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 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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