3 Rules for a Successful Dashboard Layout

Tips for designing the layout of a data dashboard for maximum usefulness

It takes a lot of work to read and understand a written report. The beauty of translating that same report into a data dashboard is that the information gets a whole lot easier to read and understand—assuming, of course, you have a smart dashboard layout.

Poorly designed dashboards are hard to read. They leave you hunting for the relevant information amongst all the colorful graphics like a kid reading a Where’s Waldo book. Ultimately, a dashboard with a bad layout is a dashboard that doesn’t get used, and if that happens, your organization will be missing out on all kinds of actionable opportunities.

Make your data dashboard appealing and useful by following these three layout rules:

Rule #1: Don’t Overload It

A data dashboard is never going to display all the metrics you’re tracking. Data dashboards should be customized to the employees that use them, based on their job duties and responsibilities. This means you don’t want to put all your financial metrics on a dashboard designed for a call center employee, for example. Instead, you would only place metrics there that the employee has the power to change, such as average call wait time.

When whittling down your metrics to decide which to display, remember that the dashboard is a tool to be used on a daily basis. This means it should display the metrics that the user checks most frequently, even if these aren’t considered the most important metrics for assessing performance. For example, a dashboard designed for a sales team would probably track daily sales and weekly sales, since those are the figures they would check often. Quarterly sales, while important in a big-picture sense, doesn’t need to be checked as frequently and isn’t critical for a dashboard.

Rule #2: Make it Read from Left to Right

For English speakers, a data dashboard should read from left to right. This is how we’ve been trained to read books as well as webpages and a data dashboard is no different. The eye naturally goes from the upper left corner of the screen across to the right, then down in a diagonal towards the lower left corner and across to the right again, in a Z shape. You’ll want to take this into account when placing data visualizations in your dashboard. The most important metrics should always go in the upper left.

Rule #3: Group Related Data Together

By placing related data sets near each other on the dashboard, it makes it easier for users to maintain their train of thought. The data checked most frequently should be at the upper left of the grouping, with related data presented to the right and then below if more space is needed.

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MyFieldAudits is an excellent example of a tool that anyone can use to track KPIs on a data dashboard. To learn more about MyFieldAudits, contact us at info@MyFieldAudits.com today.

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