As part of our team's deliverables, we will be designing a dashboard to monitor the health of the Be Well hospitals and allow users to compare the status between the different facilities.
Although all members of the team have experience doing design, whether it is through work or courses at UMSI, dashboard design has not explicitly been taught. We know the basics of using certain shapes and colors and what users expect when interacting with technology, thanks to Don Norman. However, there appears to be something of an art when it comes to the layout of various charts, text, and colors.
Hoping to learn more about best practices for designing a dashboard, I went through a couple blog posts on Yellowfin's website. Yellowfin develops business intelligence software for a variety of types of businesses, from small companies to large enterprise deployments. Their platforms stretch across many different types of BI, including dashboards, data discovery, data visualization, and mobile BI, to name a few. Yellowfin is also a leading vendor in the industry of BI, and are used by our team's technical advisory, Quantiphi. As a result, I thought it would be insightful to find out more about what Yellowfin thought to be "best practices" for the design of dashboards.
Over the course of a two-part blog series, I learned about the following "best practices":
Check out this post and this post for more details. Hoping we'll get a chance to apply these ideas to the design of our own dashboard for Be Well!
-Lan
Although all members of the team have experience doing design, whether it is through work or courses at UMSI, dashboard design has not explicitly been taught. We know the basics of using certain shapes and colors and what users expect when interacting with technology, thanks to Don Norman. However, there appears to be something of an art when it comes to the layout of various charts, text, and colors.
Hoping to learn more about best practices for designing a dashboard, I went through a couple blog posts on Yellowfin's website. Yellowfin develops business intelligence software for a variety of types of businesses, from small companies to large enterprise deployments. Their platforms stretch across many different types of BI, including dashboards, data discovery, data visualization, and mobile BI, to name a few. Yellowfin is also a leading vendor in the industry of BI, and are used by our team's technical advisory, Quantiphi. As a result, I thought it would be insightful to find out more about what Yellowfin thought to be "best practices" for the design of dashboards.
Over the course of a two-part blog series, I learned about the following "best practices":
- Communication is the #1 priority.
- Fit everything into one screen without sacrificing meaning.
- Start with the big picture, then drill down to the details.
- Ensure natural alignment and logical order of charts.
- Customize the dashboard to the company that is using it.
- Create exceptions and alerts.
- Make visible and highlight the most important information.
- Use color appropriately for maximum contrast.
- Provide context for the data.
- Support and prompt action.
- Good usability - navigable, intuitive.
- Use text sparingly and appropriately.
- Ensure quality and consistency across different dashboards.
- Layout and flow of information - horizontal charts are good!
Check out this post and this post for more details. Hoping we'll get a chance to apply these ideas to the design of our own dashboard for Be Well!
-Lan