How to create a Dash Board that people would enjoy to use?

Advanced research agency Juice analytics has prepared a guide on rules of creating a «dashboard».  The following rules are not theoretical, but taken from their personal experience.

The following three documents make up the guidelines:

Part 1: How can the Dash Board be helpful for your organization? How to identify target audience when creating a Dash Board and what the type of dashboard to use?

Part 2: How to start the process? How to choose the right metrics? How to focus attention of the audience on most important things?

Part 3: Information designer’s guidelines on which charts to use when disposing the figures in the report?

Few days ago the first one was published. I’m quoting most interesting ones; the original document is below.

What value does the dashboard bring?

1. Help management define what is important
2. Educate people in the organization about the things that matter
3. Set goals and expectations for specific individuals or groups
4. Help executives sleep at night because they know what’s going on
5. Encourage specific actions in a timely manner
6. Communicate progress and success
7. Provide a common interface for interacting with and analyzing important business data

Dash Board Infographics

For best outcome, Dash Board indicators must simultaneously meet four criteria:

1. Actionable — it is clear the source of the problem or necessary actions when the metric goes up, down, flat or off-target. ID: «Level of customer satisfaction», for example, is too general and less than certain «% of orders delivered on time» fits this criterion.
2. Common interpretation — people in the organization recognize what the metric means. ID: For example, «the price» may be accounted in sales department by shipping price lists, while marketing recalculate the retail price at which the product reaches the consumer.
3. Transparent — how the metric is generated is shared and easy to understand. ID: Example of an unclear indicator — «The relative share of the market.» Not everyone understands how it is calculated (one’s ratio of share to the share of the leader, or if you are the leader, then to the share of the second player).
4. Accessible, credible data — the data can be acquired with modest effort from a source that people trust. ID: For example, if there is no confidence in quality of information collected and its level of distribution (this is a subject of perpetual dispute in my company ), then sales department will simply refuse to acknowledge the problems and do something.

Dashboard Design Part 1 v1

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