your audience.
De-emphasize borders, backgrounds, and other elements that define dashboard areas. Try to use the natural white space between components to partition the dashboard. If borders are necessary, format them to hues lighter than the ones you’ve used for your data. Light grays are typically ideal for borders. The idea is to indicate sections without distracting from the information displayed.
Avoid applying fancy effects such as gradients, pattern fills, shadows, glows, soft edges, and other formatting. Excel makes it easy to apply effects that make everything look shiny, glittery, and generally happy. Although these formatting features make for great marketing tools, they don’t do your reporting mechanisms any favors.
Don’t try to enhance your dashboards with clip art or pictures. They not only do nothing to further data presentation, but they also often just look tacky.
Limit each dashboard to one printable page
Dashboards, in general, should provide at-a-glance views into key measures relevant to particular objectives or business processes. This implies that all the data is immediately viewable on the one page. Although including all your data on one page isn’t always the easiest thing to do, there’s much benefit to being able to see everything on one page or screen. You can compare sections more easily, you can process cause-and-effect relationships more effectively, and you rely less on short-term memory. When a user has to scroll left, right, or down, these benefits are diminished. Furthermore, users tend to believe that when information is placed out of normal view (in areas that require scrolling), it’s somehow less important.
But what if you can’t fit all the data on one sheet? First, review the measures on your dashboard and determine whether they really need to be there. Next, format your dashboard to use less space (format fonts, reduce white space, and adjust column and row widths). Finally, try adding interactivity to your dashboard, allowing users to dynamically change views to show only those measures that are relevant to them.
Use layout and placement to draw focus
As I discuss earlier in this chapter, only measures that support the dashboard’s utility and purpose should be included on the dashboard. However, it should be said that just because all measures on your dashboard are significant, they may not always have the same level of importance. In other words, you’ll frequently want one component of your dashboard to stand out from the others.
Instead of using bright colors or exaggerated sizing differences, you can leverage location and placement to draw focus to the most important components on your dashboard.
Various studies have shown that readers have a natural tendency to focus on particular regions of a document. For example, researchers at the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack III project have found that readers view various regions on a screen in a certain order, paying particular attention to specific regions onscreen. The researchers use the diagram in Figure 1-4 to illustrate what they call priority zones. Regions with the number 1 in the diagram seem to have high prominence, attracting the most attention for longer periods. Meanwhile, number 3 regions seem to have low prominence.
FIGURE 1-4: Studies show that users pay particular attention to the upper left and middle left of a document.
You can leverage these priority zones to promote or demote certain components based on significance. If one of the charts on your dashboard warrants special focus, you can simply place that chart in a region of prominence.
Format numbers effectively
There will undoubtedly be lots of numbers on your dashboards. Some of them will be in charts, and others will be in tables. Remember that every piece of information on your dashboard should have a reason for being there. It’s important that you format your numbers effectively to allow your users to understand the information they represent without confusion or hindrance. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when formatting the numbers on your dashboards and reports:
Always use commas to make numbers easier to read. For example, instead of 2345, show 2,345.
Use decimal places only if that level of precision is required. For instance, there’s rarely a benefit to showing the decimal places in a dollar amount, such as $123.45. In most cases, the $123 will suffice. Likewise in percentages, use only the minimum number of decimals required to represent the data effectively. For example, instead of 43.21%, you may be able to get away with 43%.
Use the dollar symbol only when you need to clarify that you’re referring to monetary values. If you have a chart or table that contains all revenue values, and there’s a label clearly stating this, you can save room and pixels by leaving out the dollar symbol.
Format very large numbers to the thousands or millions place. For instance, rather than display 16,906,714, you can format the number to read 17M.
Use titles and labels effectively
It’s common sense, but many people often fail to label items on dashboards effectively. If your manager looks at your dashboard and asks you, “What is this telling me?” you likely have labeling issues. Here are a few guidelines for effective labeling on your dashboards and reports:
Always include a timestamp on your reporting mechanisms. This minimizes confusion when distributing the same dashboard or report in monthly or weekly installments.
Always include some text indicating when the data for the measures was retrieved. In many cases, the timing of the data is a critical piece of information when analyzing a measure.
Use descriptive titles for each component on your dashboard. This allows users to clearly identify what they’re looking at. Be sure to avoid cryptic titles with lots of acronyms and symbols.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, it’s generally good practice to de-emphasize labels by formatting them with hues lighter than the ones used for your data. Lightly colored labels give your users the information they need without distracting them from the information displayed. Ideal colors for labels are colors commonly found in nature: soft grays, browns, blues, and greens.
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