

Information Dashboard Design, 2nd Edition - thingsilearned
http://chartio.com/blog/2013/08/informationdashboarddesign

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jwilliams
I used to work in finance (esp Market Data) and now I've ended up in Employee
Analytics.

One thing I've observed is that a user's requirements always flip, and they're
usually not aware of it. The two biggest bits of feedback I've heard are "too
much data" and "not enough data" \-- often from the same person, and
occasionally on the same dashboard.

People just want the highlights, except when they don't, in which case they
want everything. The former is really hard because highlights require a lot of
rule-based context. The latter is also hard because "everything" is often
meaningless. Too much flexibility in your data exploration tool and people
just go on random fishing expeditions.

Now I try and structure data in terms of a conversation, with an information
"needs" to determine the priority order. Start with the hurdle requirements
(e.g. something key like sample size), move through the highlights then
present the bare minimum to guide further exploration. If you make data
exploration easy from that point it this seems to work well, but I'm still
learning.

I must admit, I took one glance at the "ideal dashboard" and was a bit
bewildered. I had no idea what I was meant to be looking at, or the relative
importance of things. Perhaps there is some critical, specific domain
knowledge that I'm missing. Either way, will definitely get this book to find
out more.

~~~
officemonkey
"People just want the highlights, except when they don't, in which case they
want everything."

This is quote worthy.

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aviswanathan
Super glad that this is on the frontpage. Dashboard design is probably the
single biggest thing that analytics companies overlook when building product.
It took us nearly 5 iterations to get our dashboard to a decent point.

What's worst is when offering free trials of an analytics product and then
realizing that all freemium customers engage with a dashboard once, and then
dropoff forever. Event tracking and various stages of a/b testing can be
dangerous because they steer engineers to local minimums in designing a
product.

Having a logical understanding of every element of the dashboard is the best
way to approach the design.

Great post, we need more resources like this out there.

~~~
ianstormtaylor
What's your company's name? Checked your HN profile but no luck.

~~~
aviswanathan
Crowdery (YC S13)

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ronaldx
I'm an educator so it was interesting to see the example of an education
dashboard in the competition. This is something that we struggle with - every
educator has different needs and so it's really a difficult challenge to
satisfy teachers with digital solutions for their registers and record-
keeping.

In this case, I was super-surprised that the letter grades were barely visible
on the winning design. The post-competition design was far better in the
respect that it displayed the key takeaways prominently.

The register of attendance was lacking in several aspects compared to the
common/traditional way it's done on paper. For example, since we probably need
to see exactly what dates/days/lessons were missed, having the data in a
standard per-week format would be more useful.

From an educational point of view, we should want to use computers to improve
the quality of the data, rather than just displaying the data prettily. It
would be better to link together the available information to provide
educational insight.

Ideally, we might want to say something like: "You missed the class on X, and
performed poorly in those questions on the associated test, so you need to
catch up by studying the following", using the dashboard to access this type
of info.

Further thought: It would be awful to have the data displayed worst-to-best.
The comments pick out that this is because teachers should spend more time on
the worst performing students - in my mind, this is a fallacy (under-
performing students, perhaps yes). Worse than that - I would typically want to
easily identify the data for a particular student, in which case the data
would be better in some consistent (alphabetical) order.

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kyro
Bought Few's book. Information design is something I'm really interested in,
yet I haven't found too many resources on it, other than Tufte's books
(obviously) and a couple others. One of my favorites is _Information Graphics:
A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference_ by Robert Harris [1]. It offers little
discussion, but is an excellent catalog of all of the various ways you can
represent data.

For more exploratory information design, check out the stuff by Nicholas
Felton. He's a big quantified-self guy who every year publishes a really
nicely designed annual report of his life [2]. I emailed him once asking for
more sources on info design and he linked me to the site of a course he taught
that contained some great resources [3].

[1]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195135326/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195135326/)

[2] [http://feltron.com/](http://feltron.com/)

[3]
[http://interactiondesign.sva.edu/classes/spring11/informatio...](http://interactiondesign.sva.edu/classes/spring11/informationvisualization/resources/)

~~~
dirtyaura
Good stuff, thanks for the links. Especially Felton's course page has several
good references that were new to me. Ellen Lupton's Thinking with Type [1]
seems a fun read. Great designs also on the competition page [2].

[1] [http://thinkingwithtype.com/](http://thinkingwithtype.com/)

[2]
[http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1374](http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1374)

~~~
kyro
I would actually spend the money to buy _Thinking with Type_ , if you're
really serious about learning typography. Having the tree version lets you get
really up close and personal with the various types, and it's easy to flip
between pages to compare letterforms, etc. Another one to check out is
_Elements of Typographic Style_ [1].

1\.
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0881792063/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0881792063/)

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clumsysmurf
Analytics Press doesn't seem to have any eBook options. I hope that changes.

~~~
thingsilearned
Stephen Few actually self publishes for reasons he explains here:
[http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521](http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521)

I'm not sure why he hasn't made an ebook though. This is a new release so it
may be coming.

~~~
dmix
KDP/Createspace [1] make it really easy to self-publish on Amazon. There
really is no reason not to have ebooks at launch these days. _Especially_ if
you're self-publishing. There are plenty of apps that help (had to research
this personally recently):

[1] [https://kdp.amazon.com/](https://kdp.amazon.com/)

[http://www.booktango.com/](http://www.booktango.com/)

[http://www.bookbaby.com/](http://www.bookbaby.com/)

[http://vook.com/](http://vook.com/)

[http://pressbooks.com/](http://pressbooks.com/)

~~~
officemonkey
It's probably not trivial to make an ebook for a book as graphic and layout
intensive as this one.

He doesn't appear to be interested in working with a publisher either.

So it's either him or no one. I know I'd rather spend my time writing books,
not formatting ebooks.

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aw3c2
Damn you for making me drafting dashboards for random things now. I had stuff
to do.

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themodelplumber
Man, how do people do stuff like that in Excel? And does it feel like a design
problem that's a good fit for Excel? Just curious.

~~~
lstamour
Google for sparklines excel to see some examples.

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rvanniekerk
I've been working pretty extensively on our in-house dashboard. We've settled
on the Dashing framework written by Shopify with some rather heavy
customization.

The main focus has been on readability from long distances and the ability to
switch context when up close using the leap motion.

Check it out here -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMM2rPX2Rok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMM2rPX2Rok)

There seems to be some pretty useful information in this book that we can
apply to our current setup.

Dashing here -
[https://github.com/Shopify/dashing](https://github.com/Shopify/dashing)

~~~
bbaumgar
What's powering your setup? I've also been using Dashing to create my
company's internal dashboards and decided to hook a Raspberry Pi up to the
display to show the dashboards. Unfortunately it's turned out to be massively
underpowered, especially because our dashboards are pretty data / chart heavy.
Was just going back to the drawing board when I saw your post.

~~~
Ecio78
Your experience is interesting because Raspberry Pi will be my first thought
for a setup like this. Can you elaborate a bit about your load problems? You
said your dashboards are heavy: are you doing heavy data elaboration on the
rPi (i.e. getting data from multiple sources, calculating stuff etc..) or it
is just too heavy for handling the ruby/sinatra site with data being pushed
from outside via http?

~~~
rvanniekerk
From my experience of first trying a lightweight media center PC, leaving the
browser open for extended periods caused pretty severe memory issues with the
computer in general, that combined with the fact that Dashing itself is a
Sinatra based application with a bunch of ruby jobs running in the background
can cause some serious slowdown.

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DoormatSheikh
This guy has a few books that, from the face of them, seem very similar. Can
anyone point out the important differences or give some advice (e.g. which to
pick in what order)?

~~~
thingsilearned
Information Dashboard Design - is definitely the first one you should read. It
really gives a more high level overview of charting best practices and
dashboard design.

Show me the Numbers - goes much more in depth about the details of the
different chart types and visualization best practices. There's a chapter or
two on each of the main chart types.

Now You See It - This is described as a companion book to Show me the Numbers
and focuses on data analysis as opposed to pure visualization.

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jeffjose
What are some good resources to get inspired about Dashboard Designs, say a
reddit-subreddit or a blog or an aggregator.

Thanks!

