Inspiring Ideas for Dashboards Design
By: Maw Ferrari
Tags: Analytics, Business, Data Science, Data, Data Visualization

Inspiring Ideas for Dashboards Design

How to shape business metrics and stories into Dashboards

Are business Dashboards easy to design? You tell me: you’ll need to draw a clear picture of the most valuable information about a business subject, in less than a minute. Of course, it should also be visually appealing, interactive, quick, and self-explanatory, what else?!

Introduction

Although for many designers the Dashboards conception and development are intuitive activities, especially since the explosion of friendly tools and self-service BI, I believe that some guidelines and a methodology are necessary. To make a difference in the field we need to define our own style, our signature.

I have constantly been trying to “discipline” myself towards that direction, and it seemed to be useful also for some data professionals that I have been mentoring on the topic.

I will use an actual dashboard template about the Sales business domain to give practical examples of how to organize the content and functionalities in a professional dashboard.

The concepts I am going to talk about can be applied to any dashboarding tool, so I will never mention any of them, at least in this story. The few requirements they must satisfy are very basic: it must be possible to define nested expressions and user-defined parameters, so pretty much any tool should be OK.

Learn Business through KPIs

Before starting the actual dashboard design, you should make sure to understand the Business subject you are going to explain by your dashboard. That can be our Achilles heel unless you’re a Business Manager, or even a Senior Manager. And if you were any of those, you’d probably have someone who would build the job for you. So it’s worth spending some time learning the fundamentals about the business, and how to measure it.

Luckily for technical guys, human activities are easy to quantify, so we can understand a lot about a business domain by understanding its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). There is plenty of literature about it, with standard definitions and explications, but often they don’t go much in-depth and stay at a theoretical level.

The best way is building your own KPI library over time, increasing your repertoire step by step, aiming to select only really useful ones: normally 5 to 20 KPIs are enough to explain easy to complex business domains respectively.

Our context example: KPI in Sales

Let’s consider the intuitive case of KPIs in Sales. We consider the following data set, based on 4 measures and 5 dimensions, over 3 years of history.

The set of KPIs we could use to describe all the Sale aspect are :

Turnover: Total Sales Amount

Total Sales Amount Total Sales Margin: Sum of Sales Margin

Sum of Sales Margin Sales Margin %: Total Sales Margin / Turnover (expressed in %)

Total Sales Margin / Turnover (expressed in %) Total Sales Costs: Turnover — Total Sales Margin (expressed in currency)

Turnover — Total Sales Margin (expressed in currency) Sales Costs %: Total Sales Costs / Turnover (expressed in %)

Total Sales Costs / Turnover (expressed in %) Total Sold Quantity: Sum of Sales Quantity

Sum of Sales Quantity Distinct Items Sold #: Number of distinct items sold over the period. Count Distinct of [Product]

Number of distinct items sold over the period. Count Distinct of [Product] Average Selling Price : Turnover / Total Sold Quantity (expressed in currency)

: Turnover / Total Sold Quantity (expressed in currency) Active Customers #: Number of distinct customers having a sales transaction over the period

Number of distinct customers having a sales transaction over the period Turnover per Customer: Turnover / Number of Customers (expressed in currency)

Turnover / Number of Customers (expressed in currency) New Customers #: Number of distinct New customers (first sales transaction over the period)

So, we think that to fully describe our Sales business we need 11 KPIs, based on 4 measures. But… Isn’t that a lot to explain in a single dashboard? How do we let the User analyze them without getting confused or overwhelmed by that much information? Do we organize the content by Product? by Country? By Customer? And how do we give historical insight over at least 3 years of sales transactions?

That’s our job: Dashboard design means “to divide (the data) and conquer (information)”.