The Dashboard Spy

Dashboard design teams using enterprise dashboard software packages such as Xcelsius don’t get under the hood and create their own graphics. The idea of most dashboard frameworks and applications is that there is a pre-designed library of graphics for the dashboarders to use. In the case of Crystal Xcelsius by Business Objects, there is a palette of graphics such as sliders, dials and charts. You simply choose the control you want, wire it up to your Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (in the case of an Xcelsius dashboard) and publish it as a SWF flash file.

The point I’m trying to make is that you consume graphic styles that are designed by a graphic design team.

When you have the luxury of building a custom dashboard, you get to dictate the styling of every part of the dashboard system. Take a look at this graphic:

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When you think dashboard graphics and dashboarding metrics, the ubiquitous pie chart graph probably comes to mind first. It must be the most widely used chart in the business world. Every school child is taught to read on and every business powerpoint has one in it.

The recent issue of Stephen Few’s Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter features a lead article on this classic business graphic. The article is comprehensive - I would consider it the definitive treatise on the pie chart. It covers the interesting history of the chart and most importantly, it offers many good reasons why you should NOT use this common graph form.

Few first starts off with the history of the little pie chart. Take a look at this first known usage of the pie chart:

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Excel Dashboard

Topic: Finding Excel Dashboard Examples to Study

A Dashboard Spy reader wrote me to ask how to best go about learning how to use Microsoft Excel for dashboarding. Seems that she got assigned to a departmental dashboard team that was tasked to come up with some KPIs and dashboards.

The requirements seemed straight-forward: decide on the best metrics to display, collect them on a weekly basis, and display them on an excel dashboard.

I advised this budding Dashboard Spy to study some example excel dashboards. She asked me if I could send her some xls files. I told her I would do better than that - I would show her how I use google to find example excel dashboards to learn from.

I ran a quick query and came across this simple auction management excel dashboard:

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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.

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Long time Dashboard Spy reader know of my fascination with future dashboard technology. What will the business intelligence dashboards of the future look like? I’ve said in the past that it would great if dashboard technology really did follow the vision shown in the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report. Remember that floating user interface with the glove controls?

Ever since that movie, I suspected that Tom Cruise had a secret passion for business intelligence in general and enterprise dashboard design in particular. I am proud to announce that I’ve finally proven his involvement with business dashboards. No, The Dashboard Spy’s secret identity is NOT Tom Cruise (I won’t go that far!). But I now have a connection between Tom Cruise and an implemented, publicly-available dashboard.  

Follow me on this. First, here are a couple of reminders of the executive dashboard with the gloved interface used by Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report. See the dashboard with the virtual display?

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