Location, Location, Location – Dashboard Design
As you may have noticed (unless feed reading) there have been some layout changes to the Support Analytics blog. During the design phase, I did a little research on layouts, which prompted me to write this post. There is much documentation and research that shows most people scan pages or screens in the form of the letter “F” for FAST. Simply put, readers start in the upper left corner and scans across to the right. The difference between online/computer literacy and classic hardcopy reading, is that the reader looks less to the right as they make their way down the page. As the source states,
At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown around the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically, the lower-right corner of the page largely ignored. It happens quickly, too.
So what does this all mean in terms of dashboard design. It means that just about every dashboard I’ve seen has not been created or optimized for the reader. I don’t care about the company’s logo, probably the most overused and inefficient object in the whole dashboard. The logo should be minimized and placed in the lower right corner if included at all. When creating dashboards, I always put the most important metrics or KPIs for the company in the upper left corner. When location and “real estate” are so valuable, don’t waste it with a logo or [cringe] image/junk.
Other suggestions:
- Less is almost always better to an extent – but utilize space like it’s Boardwalk & Park Place.
- Save the images for your photo album
- 3 C’s
- Color – Use a single color for charts except for data points that you want to stand out. For example, use a light hue for all of the bars except the current month if using a bar chart.
- Consistency – Use a common theme for charts and graphs that compliment each other.
- Clarity – Have a goal and purpose in mind from the start. Don’t try to add everything, just include what’s important.
- Pretty – If you’re trying to “pretty-up” the dashboard, reread this post and pick up a copy of Information Dashboard Design
.
Understanding effective dashboard design will start you on a path to superior analytics.
Recommended:
Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few
Most Commented Posts
October 7th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Another excellent post. As a marketing and brand person, as well as a marketing and database analyst, who believes brand is very important, I will repeat what Tony said, GET THE COMPANY LOGO OFF THE DASHBOARD. If you do not know who you work for, the dashboard is not the place to remind you. The advice I give to those who are stuck including the logo is to start shrinking it and slowly make it vanish. The alternative…follow Tony’s advice. @dmgerbino
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October 7th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
@david – Thanks for the feedback. Your suggested method may help to transition out the logo versus the big bang approach where you just remove it. Some executives may have heart burn if it just disappears one day.
On another note: I wonder how many readers rhetorically said, why wouldn’t you pretty-up the data?
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October 8th, 2008 at 4:52 am
I saw that Jakob Nielsen article last year and wasn’t convinced. It seemed to me that people were just reading the F-shaped web pages in the way they had been prompted to by the design.
That’s not to say there isn’t a benefit in conforming to a standard page design, but I think the designs are following each other, not some human factors universal. It’s as if a study had concluded that humans always read text from left to right, without troublng to include any hebrew or chinese texts in the study.
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October 8th, 2008 at 11:43 am
@Derek – thank you for the comment!
I think there is *some* merit to the article. I also agree that the reading depends heavily on the page layout. I tried it out and I have a slightly different approach to online reading. When it comes to blogs, I read the title and determine if I want to continue reading. If I’m interested, I will read the entire post, unless it’s too long. If a blog post is over ~1500 words, I probably won’t read it unless I am extremely interested in the topic. If I wanted to read a book, I would go to Amazon.
In terms of blogs and websites in general, I tend to look at the title and sidebars in this order: 1)Title 2)Left sidebar 3)Right sidebar.
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