While business dashboards can adopt many distinct designs in terms of look and feel, there are a core number of basic layouts that they tend to follow. I suppose this comes from grid-based design in general and the prevalence of the template approaches in popular presentation layer technologies such as tiles and struts.

When designing custom layouts for dashboard applications built in-house or creating a custom layout in an off-the-shelf dashboarding software product, I tend to follow the 3 or 4 column approach with portlets of various sizes spanning the different columns as needed. Can’t picture what I mean?

Take a look at this dashboard layout picker from a dashboard software package (iDashboards 5.0).

What is your most commonly used layout? Do you mostly arrange portlets containing charts and graphs of various metrics and KPIs? If so, maybe you choose the 3×3 layout for 9 charts. More likely, you mix up wider portlets for text content.

It would be interesting to find out how these various digital dashboard layouts are ranked in terms of usage.

Click on the “read more” link below to see how the iDashboards software product handles the dashboard layout selection process. Screenshots of the dashboards can be found below.

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Dashboard Example: Xcelsius TCO Dashboard

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a popular financial estimate used to assess costs (both direct and indirect costs). Typically, TCO analyzes the financial impact of deploying information technology (to take an example) over the entire life cycle. Depending on the IT deployment, factors such as the following are accounted for:

• End-user computer Hardware purchase costs
• Software license purchase costs
• Hardware and Software Implementation / deployment costs
• Hardware warranties and maintenance costs
• Software license tracking costs
• Operations Infrastructure Costs
• Infrastructure (floor space) costs
• Cost for electricity and cooling
• Network hardware and software costs
• Server hardware and software costs
• Testing costs
• Cost to upgrade or scalability
• IT Personnel costs
• “C” Level Management Time costs
• Backup and Recovery Process costs
• Costs associated with failure or outage
• Diminished performance incidents (i.e. users having to wait)
• Costs of security breaches (in loss of reputation and recovery costs)
• Technology training costs of users and IT staff.
• Audit costs
• Insurance costs
• Replacement costs
• Migration costs
• Decommissioning costs

The following example of an Xcelsius TCO dashboard is from myxcelsius.com, a blog dedicated to Xcelsius Dashboards.

The following is just a static screenshot. You can click on the dashboard thumbnail to enlarge the image, but visit the dashboard itself to try out all the interactive elements. There are plenty of controls that you can use to model total cost of ownership.

Xcelsius TCO Dashboard Calculates Total Cost of Ownership

Tags: Business Objects Xcelsius Dashboard, TCO dashboards, dashboard example

Reference: Have you seen this new book on Business Objects Xcelsius 2008?

Crystal Xcelsius For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Excel for dashboards? Yes, Microsoft Excel is an excellent starting point for business intelligence visualization. It’s everywhere in the enterprise and is a good way to start an organization down the dashboard path.

Chandoo, the Pointy Haired Dilbert, consistently offers amazing Excel Dashboarding Tips over at his blog at chandoo.org. He has a set of 4 great excel dashboard tutorials contributed by one of his faithful readers, Robert from Munich. These excel dashboard lessons are great and come with downloadable excel dashboard worksheets.

Take a look at these screenshots and visit Chandoo for the corresponding lessons.

Post 1 – Implementing a Scrolling Excel Dashboard Table

Post 2 – Add Sorting to the Excel Dashboard

Post 3 – Add Percentile Information to the Excel Dashboard

Post 4 – Excel Dashboards for Data Visualization

Very nice job Robert and Chandoo. Thanks!

The Dashboard Spy

The iPhone interface offers advances in information resolution. It “elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information – too often leaving users with “Where am I?” puzzles.”

Edward Tufte walks us through how the iPhone accomplishes this in his post and video published earlier this year titled “iPhone Interface Design”.

His basic message is that the Apple iPhone has great value as an interface because of the higher information resolution available to the end user. Computer information debris reduces information visualization resolution and steals content space away from the user. Edward Tufte lauds Apple’s approach of having the controls go away leaving the user to control the information right off the page by tapping and swiping.

When you visit the page, you’ll find that a large video will load. It’s worth the wait. Here are some screen captures from the video.

This screenshot shows an image on Edward Tufte’s iPhone gallery. It is an image with sparklines. Click on the image to enlarge it for more detail.

Edward Tufte shows an image of sparkline charts on his iPhone

In this screen capture, you can see Edward Tufte’s finger as he swipes the screen to move the image.

Edward Tufte moves the iphone image of sparklines

Here is the stock market page from the iPhone. Note the level of the Dow Jones!

Stock Market Page on the Apple iPhone

Here is an updated screenshot from the Dashboard Spy’s iPhone:

Screenshot from The Dashboard Spy's iPhone

Don’t be fooled by all the green. Stocks are bouncing off their lows from the other day when the Dow Jones went below 8000!

As we saw with the Washington State Transportation Improvement Board Dashboard, Washington State takes the issues of accounting and transparency quite seriously.

They have a program called GMAP – Government Management Accountability and Performance. It was set up as an approach for the Governor and her cabinet agencies to track spending and tie it to performance. The business intelligence dashboard is a primary tool used by the various agencies to measure and manage their programs.

While some of the BI dashboards used are online (see above for the link to the transportation dashboard), others exist as powerpoint dashboards.

The powerpoint-based dashboard is titled The Next Washington and it consists of a series of slides with various metrics and economic indicators on them.

Here is a screenshot of one particular page with the “Economic Vitality Dashboard”. Click on the dashboard screenshot to enlarge it.

Washington State's Economic Vitality Dashboard

The powerpoint is distributed via email as well as posted on the State’s website.

Tags: Washington State Economic Vitality Dashboard, Washington GMAP Dashboard

Use of color is the key to this data visualization. Take a close look and you’ll realize that the gray color indicates a “yes” vote. It shows not only who voted “nay” on the $700 billion financial bailout plan, but also shows the breakdown between the Republican and Democratic representatives.

This information graphic appeared on nytimes.com. View it at this link: The No Votes – Details on the House of Representatives Bailout Vote.

Click on the image below to enlarge the information visualization graphic:

New York Times Info Graphic: The No Votes - House of Representatives Rejects $700 Billion Bailout

Dashboard designers will remember some of our posts regarding the correct use of color in business charts in general and digital dashboards in particular. We presented some material of a “prescriptive” nature. That is, we listed do’s and don’ts regarding the use of color. For example, in the Dashboards by Example Volume 1 post titled “9 Rules for Using Color in BI Dashboards“, we referred you to Stephen Few’s article “Practical Rules for using Color in Charts“. And in the Dashboard Spy post on using Preattentive Variables in Dashboard Design, we looked at this little exercise:

(click on the image to see the point)

Now, instead of “prescriptive” advice, we try the “descriptive” approach. Llet’s examine the thoughts of an experienced dashboard designer regarding his use of color during the course of designing a real estate dashboard. For this we turn to long-time Dashboard Spy contributor Robert Allison and his entry to a dashboard design contest.

Robert designed a real estate dashboard. Following the scenario of the contest in which he assumed the role of an analyst for a group of real estate agents, Robert strived to “… create a visualization that will allow them to view several characteristics of house sales in a given month to help them better track and understand what’s happening in the housing market.”

Here was Robert’s real estate dashboard. Click on the image to enlarge it. Below the screenshot of the dashboard, you’ll find Robert’s explanation of how he chose to use color to emphasize certain things in his design.

Use of Color Explained on this Real Estate Dashboard

Click on the “more” link for the dashboard designer’s thoughts.
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Dundas Consulting has made available this demo of a project management dashboard.

It’s an interactive demo, so be sure to hover over the various parts of the PM dashboard. Some elements feature hover-over/tool-tip information and other elements can be clicked to drill down into the data.

The project progress / task breakdown depicts the time spent on each phase of the project and milestone. Red indicates that a phase has exceeded the planned time. Clicking on a bar lets the user of the project dashboard see a snapshot of “available vs. estimated budget”, “time available” and various project notes.

There are several gauges on this dashboard:

Timeline gauge – This gauge depicts Actual versus Estimated times. The green ring in the budget gauge depicts “estimated” timeframe for the selected phase or milestone. The needle (pointer) of the gauge shows the Actual time spent.

Available Budget gauge – The Available Budget gauge depicts Actual versus Estimated times. The green ring shows Estimated budget for the selected phase. The needle pointer represents the Actual dollar amounts spent.

The Task Indicators show how each team on the project is doing in terms of Time, Budget and Overall Progress.

Click on these dashboard screenshots to enlarge the dashboards:

An Interactive Project Management Dashboard by Dundas Consulting

You will see when you bring up the interactive demo that the first screen you see is an explanatory screen:

Legend Explaining the Project Management Dashboard

Drill Down of the Project Status Dashboard

Be sure to visit the project management dashboard demo to get a better understanding of this digital dashboard.

Tags: Project Management Dashboard, Dundas Consulting Dashboards

Designing and implementing a Marketing Dashboard? There are some critical best practices to keep in mind. According to Pat LaPointe, author of Marketing by the Dashboard Light, one must keep the following elements in mind:

1. Build cross-functional alignment on the role of marketing
2. Map the knowledge base to identify possible critical metrics
3. Provide a financial framework to bridge short term results and long term results from investments in marketing
4. Build a comprehensive brand scorecard
5. Design a highly engaging UI

Pat discusses these 5 points in his article in Chief Marketer titled Keys to An Effective Marketing Dashboard.

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