Really Big Dashboards
Dashboard designers have always found that choosing a screen resolution size to design the dashboard to is not always a straight-forward task. While it seems at first glance that all you need do is choose the most commonly used resolution, other factors quickly surface. Currently, designing for 1024 pixel monitors is the most common for enterprise dashboard design, but you still get requests for other sizes.
People complain about squinting to read small text, but if you enlarge everything, then you get page designs that look horsey. Modern business intelligence application design favors portal-type layouts with lots of content jammed closely together with small font size. On the other hand, web 2.0 has made popular css-driven large type and lots of white space, so maybe we’ll get a shift towards that direction in the next crop of business intelligence software applications.
Anyway, the size of dashboards came to my mind recently. Let me take you on a Dashboard Spy roadtrip to discuss this dashboarding topic.
As I mentioned, I was thinking about dashboard screen size as I stood admiring this very big dashboard. Can you guess where it’s located?
Yes, it’s at the NASDAQ MarketSite location in NYC. It’s a chart showing the metrics of trade execution quality on the exchange.
Long time readers of the Dashboard Spy know that I’ve been talking about this amazing dashboard for a long time. I posted a link well over a year and a half ago to this DM Review article about the design rationale behind the NASDAQ dashboard.
Well, after chasing this dashboard for almost 2 years, I finally got to see it in person. The Dashboard Spy comes through again. I told you there wasn’t a dashboard that I couldn’t get a screenshot of!
I had the pleasure of joining a closing bell ringing ceremony at the NASDAQ exchange. As long time Dashboard Spy readers know, I’m always thinking about dashboards and never without a camera, so, yes, of course I took a bunch of digital dashboard related pictures that I’ll share with you now.
Those of you who have visited Times Square, know that giant electronic screens dominate. The NASDAQ stock exchange has a building right in the heart of the district with a huge screen hanging on the corner. The exchange calls the screen “The NASDAQ Tower”. You can see it live via the NASDAQ Tower WebCam.
Here is a shot of the entrance to the NASDAQ on 43rd and Broadway:
As you enter the building, you see that the site is called NASDAQ MarketSite. I saw that even the underside of a slab of concrete had a logo on it, so I snapped this pic:
Once you go into the building, you notice that you are surrounded by dashboards. Large screens dominate, but you will also see that the screens are inevitably subdivided into screen regions to host separate content.
This one shows the logos of various exchange-member companies:
When you go into the studio portion of the space, you see the big dashboard that is often shown on television:
The studio has several banks of screens that act as dashboards:
Here is a nice wide shot of the full NASDAQ Dashboard:
Of course, I always like to wander off the beaten track (As Dashboard Spies know, that’s how you find the good stuff!). Here are some shots of the studio engineers at work. Note the dashboard-like layouts that they use. These are shots of the video engineering area:
If you are interested in other large scale dashboards, visit this dashboard post.
PS. Sorry to say, but the NASDAQ studio is not open to the public. Only corporate bigwigs, media personalities and dashboard spies can get in. You’ll have to make do with the screenshots here and occassional glimpses of the NASDAQ dashboard on financial stations like CNBC.
Tags: Real-world physical dashboards, nasdaq dashboard, how big is your dashboard, dashboard design, dashboard screen resolution
