Page 196 -

Chapter 4 • Business Reporting, Visual Analytics, and Business Performance Management 195

Best practices in Dashboard Design
The real estate saying “location, location, location” makes it obvious that the most impor-
tant attribute for a piece of real estate property is where it is located. For dashboards, it
is “data, data, data.” An often overlooked aspect, data is one of the most important things
to consider in designing dashboards (Carotenuto, 2007). Even if a dashboard’s appear-
ance looks professional, is aesthetically pleasing, and includes graphs and tables created
according to accepted visual design standards, it is also important to ask about the data: Is
it reliable? Is it timely? Is any data missing? Is it consistent across all dashboards? Here are
some of the experiences-driven best practices in dashboard design (Radha, 2008).

Benchmark Key performance indicators with industry standards
Many customers, at some point in time, want to know if the metrics they are measuring
are the right metrics to monitor. At times, many customers have found that the metrics
they are tracking are not the right ones to track. Doing a gap assessment with industry
benchmarks aligns you with industry best practices.

Wrap the Dashboard Metrics with Contextual Metadata
Often when a report or a visual dashboard/scorecard is presented to business users,
many questions remain unanswered. The following are some examples:

• Where did you source this data?
• While loading the data warehouse, what percentage of the data got rejected/
encountered data quality problems?
• Is the dashboard presenting “fresh” information or “stale” information?
• When was the data warehouse last refreshed?
• When is it going to be refreshed next?
• Were any high-value transactions that would skew the overall trends rejected as a
part of the loading process?

Validate the Dashboard Design by a usability specialist

In most dashboard environments, the dashboard is designed by a tool specialist without
giving consideration to usability principles. Even though it’s a well-engineered data
warehouse that can perform well, many business users do not use the dashboard because
it is perceived as not being user friendly, leading to poor adoption of the infrastructure
and change management issues. Upfront validation of the dashboard design by a usability
specialist can mitigate this risk.

prioritize and Rank Alerts/exceptions streamed to the Dashboard
Because there are tons of raw data, it is important to have a mechanism by which
important exceptions/behaviors are proactively pushed to the information consumers.
A business rule can be codified, which detects the alert pattern of interest. It can be
coded into a program, using database-stored procedures, which can crawl through the
fact tables and detect patterns that need the immediate attention of the business user.
This way, information finds the business user as opposed to the business user polling the
fact tables for occurrence of critical patterns.

enrich Dashboard with Business users’ Comments

When the same dashboard information is presented to multiple business users, a small
text box can be provided to capture the comments from an end-user perspective. This can

M04_SHAR9209_10_PIE_C04.indd 195 1/25/14 7:34 AM