The fact is not every dashboard will be the perfect storyteller. Like different storytellers carry their own stories and styles but have that similar way for modulating their voices, your dashboards may be presenting different data but their designs have to carry some set, standard yet unique features to give you the most perfect and most useful business insights.
Features that Are Important for A Perfect Dashboard
When you are developing and designing a dashboard, there are several elements that you need to keep in your mind.
The Perfect Layout
A business dashboard serves the purpose of presenting your business data before you, so it’s important that it has the perfectly visual layout that provides the necessary business insights at a glance.
Simplicity
You are developing a business dashboard to make your access to information and data more flexible and easier, so that your data analytics processes become more convenient and efficient. So, you want to be sure that the data is presentable over the dashboard in a simple and crisp form. So, simplicity is the key.
Speed
This is a very important factor for an effective, efficient, and useful dashboard. When you are looking for business insights, you don’t really want to wait as any delay in analyzing the available insights can culminate in opportunity loss. So, you want a dashboard that can present the data and information in the form you want to see them within seconds. So, it’s important that your dashboards are designed while keeping speed optimization in mind.
Blending all these features in a perfect mix is what is takes for creating and designing a business intelligence dashboard that tells great business data stories.
How to Make Your Dashboard a Perfect Storyteller?
It’s just a few simple things about getting the perfect layout, structure, architecture, and design when during dashboard development that gives in for the perfect BI dashboard telling the best data stories.
Here’s all the things that you need to keep in your mind.
Follow the 5 Second Rule
A great storyteller knows delivering the right content at the right time. You need to ensure that in your business dashboard too. Your dashboard should show the relevant information at the right time so that the users can get the perfect business insights that they can salvage into an opportunity.
The 5 Second Rule works best here. The relevant data should be visible to the users on your dashboard within 5 seconds. That’s ideal. Any user will require at least 5 seconds to locate the data they are looking for. If your dashboard is designed well, the data will pop and at a glance views will become easier for the users thereby saving them time and energy and helping focus more on the goals.
Avoid Visual Clutter
Widgets and plugins add to the features and functionalities of your dashboard. Keeping that view, you end up adding too many widgets in an attempt to make your dashboard more advanced, smart, and functional. However, that only makes your dashboard to messy and cluttered to understand any information at all.
When there are too many widgets on your dashboard, it ends up creating a visual clutter making the data more disrupted that it might have been earlier in its raw form. You need to avoid that. The need for you is to use the widgets very smartly and intelligibly so that they serve the best purposes with a simple design and smart features.
Keep Your Dashboard Minimalist
Minimalism is the key in today’s time. You need not add up too many visual representations over a single dashboard just to accommodate every piece of information in it. Even if you do that, it won’t come as a benefit or advantage in any manner and will instead only create a visual clutter. You want to avoid that at every cost.
A human mind can visualize and register only seven to nine representations at once. So, that’s the most you want to add to your business dashboard.
An important principle that you must follow here is “less is more.” during dashboard design and development, you should write the codes and prepare the designs such that they can provide more information in minimal visual representations.
Plan the Layout
A story always follows a pattern and has a very well set and organized plot which is planned in detail. You need to do the same when designing the layout for your dashboard. The layout should be so designed that it’s telling a story.
The Inverted Pyramid layout comes as the most perfect choice. The users always want to have the most relevant and most important information available to them at first and then they go by the hierarchy. You must follow this hierarchical pattern when designing the layouts for your business dashboards. Keep the most important information at top, then go on to the facts, points, and other details supporting the information and data presented at top and keep the bottom section of the dashboard for very general details.
This will give the users the perfect insights that they need for the business dashboards.
The Right Data Visualization is Vital
You are not creating a business dashboard just to have your data in a simple tabular form. You can do that over Excel or Google Sheets as well. A business dashboard has much more meaning to it. And you need to add up that meaning by choosing the right data visualization.
You need to present the data in the most attractive and useful formats so that it’s easily understandable by the users and they are able to get just the business insights they need for leveraging the opportunities at their hands.
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Conclusion
A BI dashboard goes a long way in helping you out leverage and salvage the business opportunities with you through detailed insights into the important business information, data, and trends. However, to make the best of a business dashboard, you need to make sure that it’s a perfect storyteller and you can ensure that by following all the aforementioned tips and techniques when going for any kind of dashboard development.
The best you can do is hire dashboard development services from an expert professional who has experience in working over tools like the Tableau Data Visualization Software, or BIRT Reporting Tool and you can have the best business dashboards that perfectly tell the stories you have been expecting to listen.
