Topic 5 & 6 Information Dashboard Design

basically this week i have learnt quite a handful of things regarding dashboard, in areas like types of dashboard of the designing specification and things to take note when designing a dashboard.

Types of dashboard
this is some information i found from the net, do take a look : http://www.maguireassoc.com/services/strategic_planning_dasboard.pdf

however in the lecture notes, Dashboards can be use for Strategic Purposes Anayltical purposes and operational purposes as well

1.Strategic purposes dashboard
-Focus on high-level measures of performance
-Forecasts
-Indicators of performance
-Contextual information
-Simple display mechanism
-Don’t require real-time data, static snapshots will do

2.Analytical Purposes Dashboards
-support interactions with the data (e.g. drill-down)
-Show patterns for further exploration
-More sophisticated display media

3.Operational Purposes Dashboards
-Real-time information is needed for constantly changing environment
-Must grab attention immediately to alert abnormalies
-Deeper level of details is needed – can be accessed by drilling down

on top of it, i also learnt about Gestalt Principles of Visual Perception

1. Principle of Proximity
Proximity occurs when elements are placed close together. They tend to be perceived as a group.

2. Principle of Closure
Closure occurs when an object is incomplete or a space is not completely enclosed. If enough of the shape is indicated, people percieve the whole by filling in the missing infomation

3. Principle of Similarity
Similarity occurs when objects look similar to one another. People often perceive them as a group or pattern.

4. Principle of Continuity
Continuation occurs when the eye is compelled to move through one object and continue to another object.

5. Principle of Enclosure
Enclosure occurs when an object is incomplete or a space is not completely enclosed. If enough of the shape is indicated, people percieve the whole by filling in the missing infomation

6. Principle of Connection
Perception of grouping produced by connection is stronger than that produced by proximity or similarity colour, size and shape)

you could refer to @http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Gestalt_principles for more information of the principles.

Key goals and steps of visual dashboard design
1.Reduce the Non-Data Pixels
-Eliminate all unnecessary non-data pixels such as remove Unnecessary border around sections of data fragment the display, fill colours to separate sections of the display are unnecessary, 3D should be avoided when the added dimension of
depth doesnt represent actual data

2.De-emphasize and regularize the non-data pixels that remain such as Axis lines are useful but can be muted, Minimise lines, borders and fill colours for
delineating sections of data

on the other hand, there are also ways to enhance data pixels by
Highlight the most important data pixels that remain
-Information that is always important
-Can be emphasized using static means
-Information that is only important at the moment
-Requires a dynamic means of emphasis

here are some examples of bad dashboard design as it uses bright colours and the data is closely together:


you can also refer to http://www.information-management.com/issues/20050901/1035522-1.html for example of good dashboard design.
you can also refer to http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/pervasive_hurdles_to_dd.pdf for a better detail of dashboard designing.

There are also total of Six categories of display media:
1.Graphs
2.Images
3.Icons
4.Drawing objects
5.Text
6.Organisers

Bar/Column vs Line Graphs
Column or bar graphs are better than line graphs when you are comparing between groups of information such as age groups or different regions.

On the other hand, line graph is used to show the trend better. For example, you want to know how well sales have been doing for the past 3 months; you can straightaway see the increase/decrease in sales by looking at the gradient of the line. A steeper slope will indicate a higher increase in sales.

Stacked Bar/Column Graph

One disadvantage of using stacked bar/column graphs is that it is not easy to compare the different parts; it is only good to see it as a whole. Displaying the distribution of sales between the four channels (Reseller, Web, Distributor, Direct) by using column graph would be better than stacked column graph; it will be easier to compare the difference in the distribution.

Scatter Plots

Scatter plot displays whether or not the 2 paired sets of quantitative values are correlated.