Thinking About Dashboard Design 1

One of the benefits that technology has brought to business is the ability to process and present information quickly to individuals or teams to support the decision making process. To allow this to be created several things have to be understood first:

• An Understanding of the Quantitative Data
• Defined KPI’s for each element of the business (in-line with the business objectives)
• Understanding of the relationships between the information
• Are there any relevant external benchmarks?
• The information requirements of each user.
• The base data available that is connected to each entity (product, region, individual ….)

The initial design process is based, I believe, on a two directional process, looking at the existing data and KPI’s and beginning to present samples of potential screens to the clients (the person who will use the system) and in the other direction taking client information (screen ideas) and working back showing KPI’s and data that the user requires that are not captured currently. (The dashboard design process is only a small part of the MIS or BI development process).

Working Through and Example Using the example of a sales team and how we could go about presenting the information for each of the individuals involved. Using the example of a company with 4 regional teams and 3 main streams of income with different levels of profitability. Look at individual people within the organization and their information requirements in this example we will look at the Sales Director.

Sales Director (User Requirements) Narrative: The Sales Directors focus is on growing the existing and new client revenue and also increasing the amount of profit within his sales team. He also wants to compare regions and individuals with in his departments to help find difference in results and practices.

Outline Requirements: Dashboard level 1 – All Regions Dashboard We would have to define some outline envelopes for the data to be compared with to allow simple high level marker for each region and KPI. An example of this is that each region should be increasing its profit levels by 5% every three months (so in this case a performance of <2% would be Red requiring attention urgently, <4 would be Yellow requiring some focus, =>5% would be Green and require no attention unless it is to be used to compare practices against other regions). The same kind of envelopes would be set based on markets for both the growth of existing and new client revenue. Now that we have defined the rules for indicating on each region would could then use the three KPI’s to determine a overall performance. We could base this on each KPI being worth a third of the overall result or weight it according to the overall strategy. (we will call this the region indicator) Defied KPI Indicators:

• Regional Indicator: Displays the overall performance of the region.
• Profit: Displays the performance against a profit KPI
• Revenue Growth New: Display the growth of revenue with new clients
• Revenue Growth Existing: Displays the revenue growth in existing clients.

Visual: In this cases lets assume we are dealing with defined geographical locations, I would probably look to display this information over a map of the regions, the region would be filled in the color of the region indicator. moving the mouse over the region name would show an over view of each KPI for the region in pop-over box. Under the map I would use to display the information in tabular form with the all matrix shown, selecting a column cause the data to be sorted in wither ascending or descending order.

Outline Requirements: Dashboard level 2 – Drill Down In the past dashboards had a very hierarchal navigation and page structure but with the improvements in technology and improvement in MIS delivery it has long since moved from this to a multi dimensional model using a mixture of filters and comparisons (A good and easily assessable example of this is to look at Google analytics). By nature of the fact that we have now moved on to the second level visual display of the Dashboard would be more tabular supported with graphical representations of the data in various charts. Thinking about what the possible information views that the sales director might need and remember that we may present more than one piece on the same screen and filter by criteria such as data or product type:

• Regional Performance (in this example we have used this as the main dashboard)
• Individual Member of Staff
• Product Performance
• New Clients
• Existing Clients
• Individual Sales

Thinking about the Individual Member of Staff. Lets look at the levels of information we have to work with for each individual member of staff. If we look at the diagram below of the sales person we can see how the information is built up from the individual events layer. It must also be remembered that an Individual Event might belong to more than one Sub Group (this is only a basic diagram to convey an idea). Looking at this we have three main information group types which relate the physical location of the sale, the product that is sold and the client type (new or existing).

The Profit KPI score would be calculated from all the individual events that are being displayed as a result of any filter that is being applied. For example if the sales director was looking at all sales in region 1 this individual sales person would have contributed 100 sales in that region to the total. If the Sales Director then filter this by New Clients it would show that this sales person we responsible for about 50 (this is just based on the client type figures and is only as an example).

Selecting the individual sales person at this point would show detail of the individual events for that sales person (I would group them in this situation by client). Selecting a client would once again drill down further in to individual events for that client that matched all the filters. Now that the primary view has changed to the client the Sales Director can move up and down information with this being the central point. 

This could remove the filter on individual sales person and then view the details for all the sales people. You get the point the navigation has to allow the user to move up and down the data quickly. In conclusion it is essential to carefully consider the needs and uses of all users whilst at the design stage of a dashboard. In the next article I will look at some of the navigation I would use in this example and some wire frames to help to build on this.

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Related posts:

1. Timothy Brown – Innovation Through Design Thinking