You've found the famous Dashboard Screenshots page. As you can see from each day's new executive dashboard screenshot, enterprise dashboards come in all shapes, sizes and colors. The Dashboard Spy keeps track of hundreds and hundreds of different business dashboards. To tease out the trends in these executive dashboards and scorecards, we catergorize them into certain dashboard types.
As a big fan of Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the excellent book on implementing enterprise dashboards by Malik, I have decided to follow his catorization scheme. Here is the relevant graphic from page 110 of his book:
You'll note, however, that I've added a category or two that are a bit more whimsical that those in the chart.
In fact, you shouldn't worry too much about the categorization. The best way to access these dashboards is to jump into any one of them and then browse across categories.
The executive dashboards in this category are nicely designed and worth emulating. Pleasing to the eye and well laid out, they go a long way in making the system a success in the mind of the user.
Recent dashboards include:
This category contains dashboards which contain graphic design elements to avoid at all costs. This is what NOT to do when designing an enterprise dashboard. Consider this section a crash course in worst practices.
Recent dashboards include:
These dashboards don't deal with specific business functions, but, rather, provide a general view of the entire enterprise. This holistic view is most often used by C-level executives, but this view can also be made available to all to encourage "open book" management. Enterprise Performance Dashboards may feature items such as corporate financials, sales revenue, KPI (Key Performance Indicators) for the various business units, supply chain information, compliance or regulatory data, or balanced scorecard information.
Sub-categories of Enterprise Performance Dashboards:
Recent dashboard screenshots in this category include:
One of the most popular uses of dashboards today is to provide at-a-glance actionable information to division heads, operational managers and department managers. Each division has its own set of KPIs which can be visually displayed on the enterprise dashboard.
Sub-categories of Divisional Dashboards:
Some sample dashboards from this category include:
Specific business processes are often monitored via enterprise dashboards. A commonly used convention to show state of business functions is the red/green/yellow traffic light metaphor. Widespread activities are also often the subject of dashboards.
Sub-categories of Process/Activity Monitoring Dashboards:
Recent dashboards include:
In recent years, dashboards have been making appearances within custom applications as a key feature. Typically they occupy the first navigation tab and serve as a summary page of key information that the application provides. It is usually the landing page of the application after the user logs in. The portlets or screen regions are often reflective of the navigation of the application and provide deep link drill downs to the rest of the application. Hence, the dashboard page provides a navigation function.
The at-a-glance nature of this dashboard page provides great usability and user value. It is most effective when it is role-sensitive (personalized) and user configurable. The subject matter of the dashboard reflects the diversity of custom applications in general.
Sub-categories of Custom Application Dashboards:
Recent dashboards include:
Customer Dashboards are those outward-facing dashboards provided by an organization to its customers. They provide an excellent way of collaboration with the customers and are often promoted as a value-added service. Business to consumer dashboards may present utility bill information, online trading interfaces, or movie ticket information. Business to business customer dashboards may offer self-service to business functions, service level agreement (SLA) monitoring, or financial information.
Sub-categories of Customer Dashboards:
Recent dashboards include:
Vendor Dashboards allow vendors to monitor their relationships with the company. Performance benchmarks, SLA levels, purchase orders, company requirements, and supply chain elements are often monitored.
Sub-categories of Vendor Dashboards:
Recent dashboards include:
I think that this is my favorite category of dashboards. I like digital designs to "make sense" to humans in terms of adhering to some sort of underlying physical logic. That is, if a screen design uses a folder tab metaphor, I want it to be "right" and not disappoint my expectations of use. To hone one's sense of this, I like to explore the fuzzy border between the physical and the digital. This category features such examples. Check it out to see what I mean and why dashboard designers should study these types of examples.
Recent dashboards include:
Keep up on the latest products and services for digital dashboards. A wide knowledge of the landscape is critical when it comes to the technology and vendor selection phase of your dashboard project.
