Understanding the scope and the volume of every data category here is just completely impossible unless you take the time and hover with your mouse over every little section to read the numbers. The stacked chart is the worst culprit here. To get at the information, users would have to mouse across every pixel on this dashboard to make sense of the information. Here's another dashboard with a similar problem. What was the thing that contributed in a positive or negative way? It's only when you understand what happened that you're able to take action. Are we looking at one percent below the plan? Or is the performance 50% below the plan? This is something that should be obvious. You should be able to see whether performance is good or bad and how good or how bad. If you focus really hard to try and understand all of this you might glean some information.Īgain, it's really difficult to see whether the performance is good or bad? That's something that should be obvious in a few seconds. We see the revenue percentage variance in their relation to the budget. This one is a little bit more interesting because it does have certain variances calculated. This chart conveys some basic data but fails to help the user understand why things are happening in their business. Charts that lack clarity are not actionable
Here's how to choose the right chart and achieve prior mentioned goals. So it fails on both counts: a dashboard must be understandable and actionable.
This is not helping, it's not actionable and it's not even understandable. There are regular column charts, a tree map, a nice little colorful doughnut and even an attempt at geographic presentation. Instead, we have breakdowns by different categories and dimensions where every breakdown is presented with a different visual. We are not seeing comparisons to the plan or the previous year or anything at all. The number one issue here is that the dashboard has absolutely no comparisons. In the end, however, it's really hard to say: is this good or bad? and shows profit by month and product category.
What happened? What went wrong and what went right? The dashboard shows the structure of sales by product and by product category. If the situation is bad or critical, the next obvious question is why. How good? How bad? Are we underperforming? Is it critical? Do we need to take action right now? Or is everything just awesome and business, as usual, so we can move on? Again, this dashboard does not give us an answer. Are you hitting your sales targets or not? There's no way to tell, even though these are trivial questions in a business.īut even if you find the answer, the next question arises. Is this information for one month or a particular period. But this picture doesn't tell you whether sales performance was good or bad. Here in the left corner, there is some sales information and there is some profit information and new orders quantity.īut if you're looking at your sales performance and look at this dashboard each month, it doesn't answer the most obvious question: "Is my sales performance good or bad?" Dashboard design needs to answer simple questions It's obviously some kind of a sales dashboard. However, when you see something like this for the first time, you have no idea what to look for, where to click, or where to focus your attention. It's very colorful with lots of information, so we can say it has good information density and shows a lot of detail. High information density and plenty of colors do not make this dashboard actionable.Īt first glance, it looks good. Let's take a look at a dashboard example. So these two goals would be my mission here. We believe dashboards design boils down to two words: Don’t forget you also have the option to use Enterprise-class business automation and Web printing (not listed in the table below).The key concepts of Power BI dashboard design
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