Chris Gerrard — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 18:43:09 GMT

There is substantial merit in the idea of having a foundation technology useful for the construction of dashboards. I quite like the idea of having a coherent architecture from which dashboards can be rationally constructed.

However, the article misses the central point of dashboards, particularly executive dashboards: presenting enough information *in context* to provide a comprehensive analytic overview of the entire scope of the organization being examined.

To quote Edward Tufte, “Above all else, show the data.”

High quality analytic information design of a dashboard is the central factor leading to its success. In order to be effective dashboards must be information-dense and present the information clearly.

Practically speaking, this means that, as much as possible to “machinery” of the dashboard must give way to the information. The machinery must take second stage, to the point of fading completely away.

The article concentrates on the structural technical elements involved in dashboards, to the near-exclusion of good analytical information design. For example, Figure 2 labels 8 distinct structural elements but none of the data displays.

Illustrative of information design improvements that should be made in the sample dashboard…
The top two leftmost tiles show related measures for the same seven products in two line graphs covering the same time period. The As of date is the same for both and is shown four times. The product legend is duplicated, wasting precious space, as do the heavyweight title bars and non-data ornamentation.
It appears that the information in the graphs is possibly completely orthogonal in that the top graph show sales volume for each product, the bottom graph the proportion of total sales for each. This begs the question as to whether there is any additional information provided by the bottom graph. It’s hard to tell, but seems unlikely. (it would help if the graph were clearly labeled as % of total sales per product). If the second graph adds no additional information it should not be presented; if it does the presentation of the two graphs should be improved to convey their content and relationship more clearly.

An excellent resource for dashboard design is Stephen Few’s book “Information Dashboard Design The Effective Visual Communication of Data”, available from O’Reilly (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/infodashboard/) and Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effect…)

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Chris Gerrard