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.

Here is the sequence of actions for creating a new dashboard in iDashboards.

First, take a look at the default sales dashboard that comes with iDashboards:

As you see, it has a 3 column by 2 row configuration for the portlets. It has the following metrics:

• Top 10 Shipping Customers
• Market Share
• Sales by State
• Top 3 Products
• Sales Performance
• Sales by Province

Note the bottom leftmost section where you will find a “Menu” button. If you click it, you get the following panel where you can select a new dashboard and pick out the desired layout per the screenshot we saw earlier:

If you pick the 2 row layout, you will get the following dashboard template:

At this point, you can populate the top portlet of the dashboard with a graph.

Use the SQL Custom Query tool to select your data for the chart.

Here is the resulting chart in the top portlet of the dashboard:

Tags: iDashboards 5.0 Screenshot, idashboards layout configuration, digital dashboards

This is a post by The Dashboard Spy as part of the Dashboards By Example blog. Check out the following Business Intelligence resources:

Dashboards.TV
Dashboards by Example Volume 1
Business Intelligence White Papers

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))

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

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!

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

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

(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.

From Robert Allison:

Color:
—–

At first glance, this dashboard might appear to have “too much” color.
But, rest assured, the color has a purpose!

Each of the plots in this dashboard has markers/bars representing
the 5 neighborhoods - I thought it was very important to be able to
identify a given neighborhood, and be able to clearly see its values
in all the graphs. In an interactive system, I could let you click on
a neighborhood and temporarily “hilight” that neighborhood’s markers
in all the plots, but in a single/static gif image, I had to color
code each neighborhood. I picked colors which are easy to distinguish,
and which give no sense of bad/good (ie, no gradient shading).

Location:
——–

The 3 most important things in real estate … Location, Location, Location
Why should a real estate dashboard be any different?

I’m not a real estate agent, but I tried to make an educated guess
that maybe “Sales Amount” and “Days on Market” might be the two
most important things, and I put them in the top row.
(A %-based sales commission is based on selling price, and
the shorter time the houses are on the market, the more houses
an agent can sell in a year - ie, these are the factors that
most strongly affect an agent’s take-home $$).

I then tried to line up charts directly below them that had the same
horizontal axes, so you could easily compare the data between the
charts by looking up/down between them.

And finally the charts along the bottom row basically take the
info that’s in the charts generally above them, and plot them
in a slightly different way. The visual flow should be
generally top-to-bottom, left-to-right.

Tie-In’s:
——–

The colors are consistent in all charts, visually tying them together.
Since all the graphs use the same colors, I only need one color
legend for the entire graph.

Similar axes are lined up, when possible, to give visual continuity
and allow easy comparisons. Sparing use of light-colored reflines
also helps in comparing between graphs (as well as seeing exactly
where the markers/bars fall on the graph).

Also, the 3 charts that have %-based axes all have a refline at 100%.
This helps show that you’re looking at the same info, in different ways.

Extras:
——

There’s a “Help” button in the top/right. In the html/web version of
this chart, clicking on that will show you a page that explains how
to read the chart. (Information such as that the “triangle” marker
shows last year’s median value.) This explanatory, which users
generally only need to see once, would otherwise clutter the chart.

Although the contest is just for the image, this chart was also created
with html charttips (hover your mouse over the colored markers & bars
and you’ll see the data values), and drilldowns (click on the markers
and bars, and it drills-down and shows you the spreadsheet of the
actual/raw data).

—————————————————————

Results / Observations:
———————-

Filthy Richlands has the highest Sale Amount, and its median
has risen dramatically since last year. (Likewise for the
Asking Price).

Badlands Sale Amount is frequently higher than the Asking Price
(so much so that the median is actually over 100%).

Badlands has the lowest median days on market, and
Somnolent Community has the highest median days on market.

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

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.

In the beginning of the article, the author posits that the question still lingers in organizations of how exactly to measure the links between marketing spend (e.g. marketing programs, advertising, etc) and business results (leads, sales, public relations). The traditional way is through complex number crunching. This diagram is shown as a demonstration of the complexities that arise in the various components involved. Click on the image to enlarge and view details.

So is there an alternative to this messy model? The author suggests using enterprise dashboards to track the various metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with marketing programs and their results. More on the details of such a marketing dashboard in the next post on Dashboards By Example