Category: Dashboarding
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Recommended reading for December
Recommended reading December is always an interesting month. Analysts, software companies and journalists post a ton of predictions, reviews and opinions to celebrate the start of the new year. 2012 is not different. Here are a a few posts that I highly recommend reading. Most influential visualizations Tableau Software without a doubt knows a lot…
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Inspiration from Stephen Few
Greetings from San Francisco. I am back here to attend Osisoft’s vCampus developer conference. The conference kicked off with a true highlight: Stephen Few delivered one of the keynote presentations. Hopefully, all of you know Stephen and the awesome work he has done over the past years. Today’s presentation was content-rich and also very entertaining.…
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Recommended reading: How to convert complex data into a story
The Analytics Communicator Analytics professionals need to be communicators. Just being technically proficient is longer enough. It is not enough to slap a report or dashboard together on the go. Rather, we have the responsibility to help the business get information out of their data. This is especially true as data volumes continue to grow. I…
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A few thoughts about gauge charts
Gauge charts A few days ago, I had a discussion about gauge charts. A colleague and I had reviewed a collection of operational dashboards. Some of them contained large sets of gauge charts. Those dashboards were the most ineffective. At the risk of repeating myself, here are some thoughts about gauge charts. Gauge charts are not necessarily…
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5 lessons for using dashboard colors appropriately – Part 2
Selecting dashboard colors Last week, I wrote about the role of colors in photographs. A lot of the insights apply to the design of solid management dashboards and reports. Color choice does make a huge difference. So, let’s apply the ideas from the prior post and apply them to your performance dashboards, charts and reports:…
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Dashboard color – Yes, it does matter! The basics – Part 1
Dashboard color? Have you ever paid much attention to dashboard color and its effect on people? Colors are very powerful but very few of us actively leverage that to create awesome performance dashboards and reports. Just take a look at some examples that are floating around many organizations. Screens often induce headaches and are…
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How to confuse and distract your audience with poor visualizations
Excuse me? We often talk about how to best visualize data so that the audience can quickly discover the most important information in often complex data sets. But we cannot forget that it is also possible to achieve exactly the opposite effect: You can also leverage visualizations to distract and confuse people. As a matter…
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Dashboard Design Advice: Avoid eye contact at all cost!!!
Dashboard Design When I watch interviews with international sports stars, I sometimes have to laugh. Every inch of their clothing is plastered with logos from sponsors. It’s usually impossible to see or remember even a single one of them amidst this smorgasbord. We can spot a similar overload problem in many dashboards and reports. Corporate…
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What my car taught me about designing a successful dashboard
A useful dashboard? The other day, a former colleague sent me several screenshots of a ‘dashboarding solution’ a new team member had proposed to him. What I saw was wild: A set of complex, colorful and overloaded screens. Not just one screen, but a whole book of different pages. There were long tables mixed with…
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An Easter Egg hunt with three charts
It’s that time of the year. Millions of kids are excited about hunting for Easter Eggs. Why not do the same here on the blog? Below are three charts. All of them are colored according to the season. But there are some problems with each one of the charts. Can spot them? Scroll down to…