The Dashboard Spy

Business Intelligence Dashboards rely on visual indicators and graphics to quickly impart information. Nothing does this faster than a good icon. Literally, a simple dashboard icon graphic can take the place of several paragraphs of text. Even among data representation techniques, we find this true. A small sparkline can replace a whole graph of trend data.

Many Dashboard Spy readers have asked me to point them to icon sets that work well for business dashboards. I’m happy to finally reveal several incredible collections of no cost, no restriction icons great for business intelligence application use.

Start with the silk icon set at famfamfam.  Here is a screengrab of a small part of the collection. Note the red/green/yellow icons. In this case, they are represented by flags. Also, you may find useful the user icons and the color tag labels.

FamFamFam also offers for free the Mini Icons Collection. You may find some good dashboarding icons in that set, particularly if you need small icons.

Hope you like these icon sets. Hey, their small, impactful, and free. What’s not to like? Try them on your business intelligence dashboard.

Tags: Dashboard Icons, Red/Green/Yellow Icons for Dashboards, Dashboard icon sets, Digital Dashboard Design

Massive systems produce massive amounts of metrics. The challenge of business intelligence is to figure out how to slice and present the data in ways that benefit the user rather than confuse them. We’ve all seen situations where users get inundated with out-of-context numbers that do worse than confuse - they mislead and alarm.

The answer lies in information architecture, of course. Categorization of the information must be done from the user’s point of view.

New York City has gone out of its way to organize the performance metrics available to track the performance of its many agencies. The city has organized its KPIs by what they call “themes”. A great idea. Here is the diagram they display to people interested in NYC citywide performance metrics. They ask you to indicate a theme, or area of interest as follows:

Nothing to it, you say. “It’s obvious”. Well, if it were obvious, why do we still see those dropdowns with hundreds of values to choose from?

By using navigation to split users and find out their intentions, we can limit field choices to a reasonable level once they get to the data request form page.

Here is the link to the New York City Citywide Performance Reporting application.