3 Practical Tips For Effective BI Dashboard Design and Implementation

We can spend years discussing the psychological, neurological, and abstract business potential behind the use of dashboards as part of a business intelligence solution. It's quite literally a never ending endeavor.

As product managers, analysts and designers, we've buried our faces in pages of scholarship related to color schema, organizational layout, labeling and the exportability of our information. We've debated the relative merits of 3D vs. 2D, sparklines, deviations, and it always seems like we're still striving for continuous improvement in design and user acceptance. The volume of work dedicated to the study of analytical dashboard science - present and past - has been truly tremendous and worthy of applause from every corner of our industry.

Having said all that, it's also been overwhelming for many of us who are trying to get down to brass tacks and increase the usability of the visual information we produce. The clients and consultants we work with need to know how the dashboards translate to palpable business purpose. The virtually indiscernible shades of orange for our bar graphs or the size of our aggregate table measurements may be keep us up at night,, but we need to plainly accept the fact that our business users just don't care about that as much as we do.

Organizations purchase business intelligence tools for the outcomes they produce from data. Sure, the visual appeal is really great, but let's never lose sight of the central principle of implementing BI: to better understand a business and make data-driven decisions more confidently.

As such, let's take a holistic and practical look at dashboard design and implementation. These three simple tips not only compare the benefits of certain visual formats over others, but they also look at the business context ...