Best Practices for Building Digital Dashboards

1. Introduction

This paper defines what a digital dashboard is and is designed to help you identify the key elements which make a digital dashboard useful. Having over 3 years experience in building and designing digital dashboards for multiple needs and end users, Dundas Software is in the unique position of consolidating our experience into information that will help you build a visually appealing and well designed digital dashboard.

A digital dashboard is a collection of data visualization tools that provide the means to quickly get an overview of how an organization or a section of an organization is performing and the reasons behind its performance. A digital dashboard achieves this by allowing a user to monitor important business activities and processes that give insight into a company’s activities. One example of a tool used by dashboards is KPIs. KPIs, discussed more in section 3.3, give the user a very accurate idea of how a unit is performing without the user having to do deep analysis. KPIs are a fast and efficient way to deliver information, and are an integral part of a digital dashboard. In addition to providing quick analysis tools such as KPIs, dashboards allow the user to analyze the root causes of performance from many different perspectives. Once the root causes of performance are known, it is much easier for that organization or individual to act accordingly. In short, a digital dashboard is a tool that allows a user to quickly monitor and analyze an organization, division, group or individual’s performance.

Digital Dashboards are used in all industries including Manufacturing, Financial, Healthcare, Retail, Education and Energy. Each industry uses dashboards in different ways, but the overall purpose of a dashboard stays the same.

Figure 1: Financial Dashboard

Figure 2: Help Desk Dashboard

As you can see in Figures 1 and 2 above, the help desk dashboard looks very different from the financial dashboard; what may be useful for one industry may not be at all useful in another. That said every industry has some metrics that can benefit from a dashboard format and that can potentially make a company more efficient.