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19 April 2023
Analytics & Optimisation
Designing dashboards is an essential part of data analysis and visualization. A dashboard helps users quickly and easily understand large amounts of data by presenting it in a clear and concise way. In a best-case scenario, that is. In practice, a lot of dashboards are just hard to use and not user-friendly at all. Ranging from choosing the wrong graphs to visualize data, to using complex jargon or incorrect colors. If you want to design user-friendly dashboards in an effective way, user experience (UX) should be at its foundation.
When you think about how dashboards could benefit from UX, the first things that comes to mind is probably its design. A very correct answer. Though, design shouldn’t be the priority on your list. To me, a good dashboard starts with asking good questions.
Get to know your dashboard users
The best user experience puts the user front and center. This is no different with creating a dashboard. Before the beginning of a dashboard project, get to know the users that will be interacting with the tool:
Who are the users of your dashboard?
What questions do they want their dashboard to answer for them?
What’s their level of data knowledge and interpretation?
Depending on the answers to those questions, your dashboard might need to look and behave very differently. Imagine you’re designing a new dashboard for a big sneaker company. Their data analyst might be interested to drill-down into local sales details of a specific pair of shoes and compare between different categories. The marketeer, on the other hand, just wants high-level figures to communicate if they had a good month in terms of sneaker sales. They might not be aware of each other’s domain terminology as well. In this scenario, two separate views may be a solution to avoid frustration for both users.
Next to asking questions, there might be other sources available to gather user insights. Think about user personas or other user research that a company has done previously that can help you determine the best needs for your dashboard. Knowing this at the start might save you a lot of revisions later in the process too.
Key takeaways:
Before you start designing, get to know your dashboard users.
Ask questions about the user’s specific dashboard goals, needs and requirements.
Use personas or other user data that’s already been collected by the company to better match their needs with the dashboard.