Business Intelligence
Mistakes
In our experience, we have found that the best meaning designers of dashboards make
consistent mistakes. The most common are:
- Clutter - the more items on a dashboard, the more likely it is that important information
will be missed
- Too many colours - the more colours, the less likely that important changes in colour
will be missed. Issues with colour blindness need to be borne in mind
- Relevancy - having more data that is not important detracts from the important data
- Large graphics - many dashboards waste space by using large 'dial-like' images that
take a lot of space but don't give much informational value
Further to this, there are many styles of data presentation that are poor.
- Pie Charts. One thing they do well is to show in a qualitative way, the relative values of various
categories. Unfortunately the negative aspects outweight the positive. The legend is separated from
the displayed values and is not easily connected without cluttering the chart. This separation forces
the eye to move from the pie to the legend and back to the pie to get the meaning of each element.
- Dials. These are a very traditional dashboard element, only because of the historic connection to vehicle
dashbaords. On vehicles they are appropriate but on computers they are low in information density. Another
aspect that they are poor at is providing a measure of improvment month on month.
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