Improving Dashboard Insights’ “Best Dashboard of 2011”
Dashboard Insights announced its winner of the best dashboard of 2011 contest
here.
This post describes some of its flaws, and adjustments that improve its ability to communicate the salient points.
The winning dashboard was created in Tableau and published to Tableau Public, where it’s available for viewing and downloading.
Note: Tableau Public dashboards can be functionally embedded; this one’s too wide to show it all, so the Dashboard images in this post are reduced reduced to fit. Click on any of them to connect to them on Tableau Public.
Dashboard Insight Winner - Best Dashboard of 2011
Redesigned Dashboard
The following image shows the dashboard zones identified for redesign. Descriptions of the adjustments made, and the rationale behind them, follow.
Dashboard Zones
2 – Upper Section
4 – Activity Types
6 – Spend vs Budget
8 – Retirement Plan
Better BI 
For the most part I like your changes Chris. The bar charts at the bottom definitely make comparisons across categories easier.
I also really like the variance chart on the upper right.
However, the Budget, Spend and Variance table should be in dollars. Rounding up would not be appropriate for a banking account like this.
I also suspect that Mike’s intent, though he would need to confirm, is for making it more of a “lookup” view rather than for analysis. That would explain the differences in effectiveness between his viz and yours.
Definitely keep an eye out for future contests and get some vizzes entered. There typically aren’t too many contestants.
Andy
Andy Kriebel
January 1, 2012 at 3:59 pm
Hi Andy, I’ve changed the values in the table to show the cents, but haven’t included the $ symbols.
Putting in the cents seems reasonable to provide a consistent and meaningful level of detail.
Adding the $ symbols add little semantic value since all the numbers in the dashboard, but for the Retirement chart scale, are monetary and their presence imposes an additional cognitive load.
I left the cents off of the payment analysis bar marks. It seems like their main purpose is to identify the fractional relationships between the sources of payments vis-a-vis the Monthly Expense, in which case adding the cents adds visual bulk that exaggerates the lengths of the bars far out of proportion to the benefit. And the details are available in the tooltips if desired.
Chris Gerrard
January 4, 2012 at 9:16 pm
I agree Chris. Nice changes.
Andy Kriebel
January 5, 2012 at 10:54 am
I would sort the months in the opposite order. The most actual at the top.
Michal
January 3, 2012 at 6:24 am
Michal, if by “most actual” you mean “most recent”, I agree. Putting the most recent, hopefully current, month in a consistent location is highly desirable.
Designing good date selectors is difficult; there are many factors to consider.
In this case, the underlying premise is that the dashboard will always show the same number of months: current month, and the preceding 10; this is likely not to be the case in a real-world dashboard.
Chris Gerrard
January 3, 2012 at 10:44 am
Hi Chris,
Highly enlightening post and analysis. I never cease to be amazed at improvements that can be made to most vizualizations! I think this will make a lovely data viz case study or project for a varsity course in one of our varsities running the Tableau educational program.
Vusi
January 9, 2012 at 3:24 am