"Dundas Consulting did a fantastic job and was able to deliver the final project in two weeks, as planned. We were particularly impressed with the responsiveness of our consultant, as well as his willingness to share his opinions about our needs. Since this was our first dashboard application, we appreciated his candor and experience - especially on the subject of user interfaces."

Mitesh Patel
Executive Technology Director, TMX Communications

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Our Methodology

A Guide To Dashboard Creation

Step Four: The User Experience

Now that we understand what the end user is trying to do with the dashboard - and the basics of how it will look - we can then start making decisions on all the potential types of filters and drill-downs that are possible.  To help explain this, comparison functionality is always important: Say you have sales data and you want to compare this year's trend to a previous year's (since choosing a date range is a common filtering functionality).  Are you doing better or worse than a previous year?  Using a dashboard-design illustration, perhaps it's helpful to see dashboards as a building of three levels:

• The summary view - which is an aggregate of the metrics, usually presented in a scorecard format
• The second-tier view - which may show trends or provide a breakdown of the summary view, or a closer look at a particular metric
• The raw data - which is often just the tabular format data you see in reports (so if you're a business analyst and you need to read the raw data, there it is!)

The ability to drill down into these levels - and filter the data - is the main part of the user experience.  One consideration of the user experience is the end user's "role."  If you're an executive, you often don't have the time to go over the raw tabular data, you're likely concerned with just the summary view or the trends of the second tier (so you can make important, timely decisions).

With the dashboards designed by Dundas Consulting, we try to balance the amount of data shown - never too much! - and we regularly try to display as much data as possible without having to drill down.  It's always a fine line to walk when you consider the amount of data vs. the amount of functionality.  Here is where hover-overs come in handy.  Executives may not want to drill down to another page, they may wish to see just a breakdown or a metric on the same page, so employing a hover-over will usually suffice.

Another important factor to consider is having a printable version of the dashboard, as it imposes certain restrictions.  These considerations include:

• Tooltips - sure, they can show the values without cluttering up the graph, but they will not show up in a print version.  So you have to think about balance: (E.g., a solution would be to show an enlarged version of the chart in the printable version, to allow more room for labels.)
• For obvious reasons, hover-overs don't work in printing (it's a software functionality)
• The size issue - screen sizes and paper sizes are usually different, so you need to make the same report in a printable (A4 portrait or landscape) format.