The right way to design your dashboard
Keep your dashboards so simple and straightforward that your users should be able to get the most important information they need at first glance.
It’s been a common trend for designers to throw around fancy charts, lists and numbers around the homepage of their dashboards. While a lot of these designs are beautiful and like eye candy, many of them are not very usable. Because dashboards are an essential part of many products today - showing users a condensed preview of the entire system into which they are built - designers must take delicate care to correctly put together the dashboard of their products.
A car’s dashboard is a perfect example of a usable or useful dashboard. It displays the most important indicators that show the health of the car, with a few controls that help the driving experience. While some indicators directly show the status of a key component, some other indicators are a combination of different component statuses. For example, the Battery indicator will show that the car’s battery is flat or not charging. The Check Engine indicator, on the other hand, shows that a couple of things may not be working properly, and you’ll need to get to an auto shop to diagnose the problem. In all, these indicators are designed in such a way that they make sense to the driver, they prompt the driver to take certain important actions.
This is the same way we should approach the design for product dashboards. The different indicators and metrics on your dashboard should be pointers to the status or health of the different components that make up the entire system and should lead users to take necessary actions. Like in the car analogy, some of these indicators could reflect the state of a single important component, or be a combination of multiple information.
Dashboards should be usable and designed in a way that helps your users to make better decisions as they use your product.
Dashboards should be organized, intuitive and very user-friendly. They should be usable and designed in a way that helps your users to make better decisions as they use your product. Since the dashboard is usually one of the first pages that your users interact with when they get into your product, it becomes critical to be intentional about what you want them to do or see. The visual hierarchy of the dashboard should be properly engineered to give more prominence to the most important indicators and actions.
It may take some time to learn the different controls and indicators on a car’s dashboard, but this is becoming easier as manufacturers are now making dashboards that are more intuitive and driver-friendly. The same goes for product dashboards - designers are taking extra care to ensure that users get more value from dashboards by designing them to be simple, easy to use, and more directional.
Here are a couple of things you could consider as you design the right dashboard for your product:
1. Why do you need a dashboard?
Truth be told, not all products need a dashboard. Some apps are just so simple and straightforward that adding a dashboard might just be an overkill. For a product that actually needs a dashboard, it’s important to define the purpose of this feature. Defining the dashboard’s purpose helps the designer to make choices on what information to display and how best to display them. If you need to monitor and manage operations or activities in real-time or near-immediate time frames, for example, an operational dashboard with more visibly distinguishable and comparative charts or data representations will more likely suffice. If the goal is to analyze chunks of historical data and trends, an analytical dashboard will be useful. The bottom line is that, just like any other page in your product, the dashboard’s purpose must be clearly spelt out .
2. Prioritize information
Because, like a car, your product is made up of many important systems, it makes sense to only put the most important indicators and information on your dashboard. This is critical because you only have very limited real estate for components on your dashboard. Also, putting in a lot of important indicators on the dashboard can mar the experience, because this can create a phenomenon called information overload. Arguably, there isn’t a very fine line between just enough and too much information for some dashboards. However, one great way to prioritize what shows up on your dashboard is to weigh the effect that the information on an indicator has on the success or failure of the entire system. A petrol car, for example, is as good as useless or won’t go very far without fuel. That’s why manufacturers prioritize the information on the level of fuel by adding the fuel indicator to the dashboard. Now, imagine replacing the fuel indicator with an indicator that shows the total weight of the passengers in the vehicle. Doesn’t make sense, right?
3. Design the dashboard last
Designing the dashboard last may sound counterintuitive, especially since most designers are often thrilled to start with it. But the information displayed on the dashboard is pulled from different parts of the system, so it makes sense to at least define these different parts before working on the dashboard.
The dashboard-first approach to designing may not be very sustainable because there will be a lot of updates to the dashboard as you work on other parts of the product.
There are a lot of benefits to taking the right approach to designing dashboards. It’s important to treat dashboards as important as any other key feature of your product, if not more. Never go overboard with your dashboard design. If possible, go minimal, but pay good attention to what’s important for your users. Great dashboard UX can positively influence user behaviour, and consequently the success of your product.
