Dashboard Report Criteria Selection
Dashboards are most effective when users can set their own preferences and choose their own content. Many great dashboards don’t allow for this at the user level, so I wouldn’t say that you absolutely must offer that feature to guarantee user acceptance of your dashboard, but it really is a great feature.
From the IT department’s point of view, offering user configuration and personalization does makes things a bit more challenging with the need to persist the latest user settings and such, but the benefit versus cost analysis is often quite high.
From a design perspective, let’s take a look at how to let users configure their dashboards. There are a few different paths to take in terms of how to intuitively design this. I’ve seen text-only configuration screens and wizard-driven dialogs. I’ve also seen in-place editing of the various dashboard portlets.
Let’s take a look at an approach where you look at a representation of the dashboard layout and select your report criteria for each dashboard portlet. Take a look at this screenshot:
In the next screenshot, you’ll see the results of your selections.
Here’s the dashboard after you select the views you want:
The actual report criteria selection controls are plain and text-driven. No big deal - but it is pretty neat to follow the visual layout of the final dashboard. This allows the users to reference the model they’ve built in their minds and make the process intuitive and easy to visualize.
A word about the functionality of the dashboard itself. As you can see, we’ve been looking at a car sales overview dashboard. The portlets are:
- Number of Car Sales - City by Year
- Number of Car Sales - Model Type by Year,
- Profit
- Number of Car Sales - Year & Quarter
- Percentage Profit - Year and Quarter
- Number of Car Sales by Existing Customers
Now the design mode screen that I first showed does not necessary mean that each user can set their own dashboard data preferences, the level of functionality is up to you. You can decide to offer that screen only to administrators who set the dashboard preferences across the board.
Tags: Dashboard Reports Selection, Dashboard content - report criteria, Dashboard Configuration
