What is the Color of Business Intelligence?
Designing the look and feel of an executive dashboard, KPI scorecard or any other business intelligence interface can be quite the challenge for those dashboard implementors that do not have formal (or informal) graphic design training. The question for a dashboard design newbie is literally, “Where do I start?”. One common approach is to emulate the look of other business intelligence applications. I must tell you that one of the main reasons for the popularity of The Dashboard Spy and it’s companion collection of 1000 executive dashboards, is the use of the screenshots as graphical references. Using this approach, while it does give you a headstart, can have the negative impact of making your executive dashboard look like everyone else’s.
So how do you start? Well, maybe you can inspire your creativity by focusing first on the basic graphic design elements. Choose an element to think about first. Say, color, for example.
Here is a really nifty way to spur your creative thoughts on the meaning of colors. Take a look at this application at www.colorofmysound.com:
Have you ever come across a tool that you don’t really know how to use, but you just know that it will help you? This is one of those types of tools. The idea is that it forces you to think out of the box and expand your design sensibility. The application loads and plays a sound file - usually a song from a certain category. You are supposed to listen to the sounds and react emotionally in terms of color. Translating sounds into color is a non-logical endeavor and so this exercise is particularly challenging (and valuable) to the typical business intelligence application designer.
Here are some screengrabs of some colors that I came up with:
Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, this application simultaneously engaged yet baffled many business metrics types that I showed it to in a very strong way. I first asked what they thought the color of business intelligence was. This brought blank stares. I then introduced them to this color of sound application and let them play. On my next visit, I asked what colors they wanted on their executive dashboards and this opened a surprisingly sophisticated discussion of the effects that look and feel can have on a dashboard user.
Tags: Business Intelligence Graphic Design, Dashboard Design Patterns, Dashboard Colors
