I loved 98% of this post. As you point out at the start, the whole point is to make the dashboard easy to understand which is not actually easy to do! This is a great summary of some of the common tools to use and what they are for.
For anyone looking to really up their visualization and dashboarding skills (and a bunch of free time) I recommend Stephen Few's books. They are extremely detailed.
But that 2%...did you have to recommend a pie chart? 😞 I was actually joking with our UX team the other week about how when someone selects pie chart we should show them a horizontal bar chart with a message pop-up saying its better. And if they keep doing it, make the message more passive aggressive each time.
Thank you for your comments and the suggestion for further reading, I’ll check it out.
I was trying to avoid sounding too negative on the pie chart. If you have two variables it can be ok. If you have many and you decide on a 3D, exploded, translucent pie chart with labels in a large font... it’s time to reasses.
I also didn’t touch in the ‘gauge’ chart which seems to be very common at the moment. I find them distracting and (usually) misleading due to the scale. The also usually come with arbitrary colours based on how far you are from the target that can be distracting.
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I loved 98% of this post. As you point out at the start, the whole point is to make the dashboard easy to understand which is not actually easy to do! This is a great summary of some of the common tools to use and what they are for.
For anyone looking to really up their visualization and dashboarding skills (and a bunch of free time) I recommend Stephen Few's books. They are extremely detailed.
But that 2%...did you have to recommend a pie chart? 😞 I was actually joking with our UX team the other week about how when someone selects pie chart we should show them a horizontal bar chart with a message pop-up saying its better. And if they keep doing it, make the message more passive aggressive each time.
Thank you for your comments and the suggestion for further reading, I’ll check it out.
I was trying to avoid sounding too negative on the pie chart. If you have two variables it can be ok. If you have many and you decide on a 3D, exploded, translucent pie chart with labels in a large font... it’s time to reasses.
I also didn’t touch in the ‘gauge’ chart which seems to be very common at the moment. I find them distracting and (usually) misleading due to the scale. The also usually come with arbitrary colours based on how far you are from the target that can be distracting.