Presentation for the AUA conference in April 2016

1. Dashboards
Driving Change or Driving Us Insane?

2. Introduction
 Martha Horler – Senior Data Management Officer
 Jim McCarten – Head of Data and Information Services
 Registry Services at Manchester Metropolitan University

3. What will we cover?
 What is a Dashboard?
 Common mistakes in designing a dashboard
 Designing your own dashboard
 Using dashboards to make decisions
 Options for the technical side of creating a dashboard
 Further reading

4. Definition
“A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to
achieve one or more objectives that has been consolidated on a single
computer screen so it can be monitored at a glance.” (Few, 2013)
 Visual display
 Achieving objectives
 Single computer screen
 Monitoring at a glance

6. Additional Attributes
 Small
 Concise
 Direct
 Clear
 Customisable

7. DISCUSSION
 What areas of your work could have information presented in a
dashboard?
 Discuss with a partner
 Make a note of an example for later

8. Thirteen Common Mistakes in
Dashboard Design
 From Stephen Few’s book
 Examples to examine design that doesn’t work and learn why

9. 1. Exceeding the boundaries of a single
screen
 We can only hold so much
information in the mind at one time
 Avoid scrolling in either direction
 Avoid putting related data on
different ‘screens'

10. 2. Supplying inadequate context for
the data

11. 3. Displaying excessive detail or
precision
 Should be a quick overview
 Takes longer to process information when too precise
 Check number of decimal places
 Will rounding numbers suffice?

12. 4. Expressing measures indirectly
 What does the viewer need to know?
 Don’t make them do calculations
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 -15
-10
-5
0
5
10
15
20
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

13. 5. Choosing inappropriate display
media

14. Quiz

15. Answers
1. A
2. C
3. B
4. A
5. C
6. C
7. D

16. 6. Introducing meaningless variety
 Why use different chart types for everything if you don’t need to?
 Annoying to look at
 Hard work to decipher

17. 7. Using poorly designed display media

18. 8. Encoding quantitative data
inaccurately

19. 9. Arranging information poorly

20. 10. Highlighting important information
ineffectively or not at all

21. 11. Cluttering the display with visual
effects

22. 12. Misusing or overusing colour

23. 13. Designing an unattractive visual
display

24. Activity
 Use post-it notes and paper to
create dashboard design
 Use the area of work thought
of earlier
 Discuss your design with the
person next to you

25. Using dashboards to make decisions
 Dashboards need a purpose
 What decision will be made from looking at the data?
 What action will the data prompt?
 Start with the end in mind
 What decisions currently being made would benefit from more data?

28. How to build a data dashboard
 Microsoft Excel
 Quick, easy to use, connects to a range of data sources, good for prototyping
 Software solutions
 Tableau (free/public & paid)
 Microsoft Power BI (free/public)
 Jedox/SAS/Cognos/Oracle/QlikView
 Programming solutions
 Webpage: HTML, JS, CSS, PHP
 Flash & ActionScript
 R
 Python

29. Example Excel Dashboard

30. Example Tableau Dashboard

31. Example R Dashboard

32. References
 Information Dashboard Design (2013) Stephen Few, Analytics Press
 978-1-938377-00-6
 Visualize This (2011) Nathan Yau, Wiley Press
 978-0-470-94488-2

33. Summary
 Explained what a data dashboard is
 Shown examples of bad dashboard design
 Worked on an example dashboard for your organisation
 Learnt about some tools to help you create your own

34. Thank you!
 Any questions?