Author: Stephen Few Published: Jan 2006
In the book, Mr. Few highlights the common design mistakes of dashboard design and provides tools to enable the audience to easily get the relevant information quickly. Stephen draws from psychology to define best practices for organizing business information in a way that elevates accurate interpretation. He promotes the use of Bar graphs for clearly displaying information, while demonstrating that our human parallel processing of our eyes and brains do not effectively interpret quantitative scale using pie charts or radar graphs. The book insightfully shares that Dashboard Design has different forms depending on the different role of which it will be used.
Few classifies Information Dashboard into three types relative to the Role:
—Strategic Purposes: The primary use today is the Executive Dashboard that provides a quick overview that decision makers need to monitor the health and opportunities of the business.
—Analytical Purposes: Require more context behind the numbers, including meaningful comparisons, historical background and more specific performance evaluators.
—Operational Purposes: Monitors Operations that are continuously changing and may require immediate attention. Operation Dashboards require the most specific and highest level of detail, but must also be clear and simple for the audience to understand quickly what needs to be done.
Before this book, few people knew to differentiate Dashboard Design according to the role the information will be used for—Strategic, Analytical or Operational.
Another key takeaway is to avoid fragmenting data sets that share relationships. Stephen argues grouping interrelated together on a single screen can tell a more complete story. Mr. Few says of Information Dashboards, "simultaneity of vision that it offers: the ability to see everything that you need at once. This enables comparisons that lead to insights."
Stephen Few has 20 years of expertise in the field of data visualization and is an MBA professor at Haas Business School, UC Berkeley.
Click for additional Resources:
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment