UX of a Business Dashboard — What, Why, and How?

What, How, and Why?

A dashboard is a visual representation of the most sensitive data needed to achieve one or more objectives; Summarized and arranged on a single screen for easy monitoring. Dashboards can be tailored to a department’s or company’s specific requirements. A smart dashboard design -

Simplifies the complex: We have a lot of data, a lot of it is always changing, and we have a variety of analytical demands. We want to take all of these complications and simplify them.

Tells a clear story: We want to be able to link data to its business context and respond to viewer questions.

Expresses the data’s meaning: The dashboards you choose must accurately depict the data and the information you want to extract from it.

Details are revealed as needed: We want each viewer to have access to the information they require — no less, no more.

Types of Dashboards

Strategic dashboards equip managers and executives at all levels of the business with the information they need to evaluate the firm’s health and discover future expansion and improvement possibilities.

Analytical dashboards offer users the data they need to understand trends and why certain things are happening. Also, this dashboard allows users to interact with data, such as examining it in greater depth, it’s also critical to keep the capacity to compare data over time and across multiple parameters.

Operational dashboards are designed to monitor real-time activity and alert users when something goes wrong. It should send users precise alerts and give them the information they need to rapidly restore regular operations.

Who Needs a Dashboard and Why?

Dashboards enable speed, but they also provide flexibility; you may see the data in whatever way suits you best, or in whatever method is best for sharing and storytelling to encourage a greater understanding of performance across your business.

They gain real-time insights and competitive assessments, which they utilize to highlight problems that need to be addressed immediately, streamline workflows, and correctly allocate resources. Users will find dashboards particularly useful when:

• Reporting on a quarterly and annual basis, as well as tracking spending over time.
• Creating, managing, and disseminating reports.
• Filings are being tracked over time depending on business units, geographic locations, and submissions.

“With the emergence of data-driven enterprises, 80–90% of all digital applications will require assistance from well-executed dashboard designs.”

Dashboard Design Principles

Various types of charts

• When it comes to depicting patterns of change across a continuum, Line charts are fantastic. They are concise, exact, and clear.
• Use Bar charts to quickly compare elements in the same category, such as page views by nation.
• Pie charts aren’t always the best option. They get a low precision rating because it is difficult for consumers to correctly compare the pie slices’ sizes.
• Sparklines don’t normally have a scale, therefore consumers won’t be able to distinguish between individual values. However, they perform well when you have a large number of indicators and merely want to highlight the patterns.
• Scatterplots are similarly difficult to interpret. Because the relationships between two quantitative measures don’t change very often, they lack precision and clarity.
• Bubble charts according to the majority of experts, are unsuitable for dashboards. They necessitate far too much mental work on the part of their consumers.

Don’t cram everything onto one page.

Make dashboards that aren’t one-size-fits-all, and don’t end up putting everything onto a single page. Consider your audience as a group of people with different needs. — The sales manager does not require access to the same information as the marketing specialist or the human resources department. If you truly want to put all of the data on one dashboard, you may use tabs to divide it up by theme or subject, making it easier for users to access information.

UI/UX Standards & Best practices

1. Dashboard UI colors

You have the option of sticking to your company’s identity (the same colors, logo, and typefaces) or experimenting with a different palette when it comes to color. A typical error is to use extremely saturated colors too frequently. You can choose a few colors and then experiment with gradients.

2. Arrangement of layouts

More than good measurements and well-thought-out visualizations are at stake when it comes to dashboard design concepts. The usual rule is that the most important information should be displayed first, in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

3. Provide context

How will you know whether the data is good or bad, normal or odd if you don’t have a context? Users can’t make sense of numbers on a dashboard unless they can compare them to other data.

4. Minimal real-time data

Don’t rely on real-time info too much. In some circumstances, having too much information displayed in detail can be a source of distraction. The majority of project dashboards simply need to be updated weekly, daily, or hourly. After all, the most important data is the correct data.

Few of Our Awesome Dashboard Samples

We have done the following dashboards:

BPM Application Dashboard

This dashboard graphically depicts all of the crucial aspects, as well as the essential numerical context. As a result, users will be able to concentrate on optimizing the process between production, fund groups, finances, quality, and other important industry elements.

Viteos Fund Services Dashboard

The dashboard below has a creative way of keeping important data available while providing the user with an easy and useful way to see it on their own terms.

Take a look at it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9QooP04y4A

Vidal Health Dashboard

It uses explicit targets and tries to reach pre-determined results, bringing pertinent visualizations of various parts of the healthcare organization at your fingertips.

Energy Management system Dashboard

This dashboard is designed to provide top management with a comprehensive picture of analytics data as well as global insights into how the automation system facility is doing so that they may improve their processes.

Conclusion

With resources and operations distributed, businesses are becoming increasingly global, needing advanced data analytics in a collaborative atmosphere. Inspect and see if your dashboard is causing the desired behavior. Take a step back from your board now and again to look at how the different sections interact. Using this information through bespoke dashboards is the next step in enhancing procedures, getting unique insights, and increasing performance. Are you ready to take your company’s visualization and reporting to the next level? Connect with us to build your digital dashboard, which will provide you with custom-tailored insights to help you meet your specific company goals.