The creative market researcher always seeks to go beyond the limitations of the source data and add value.   One way of doing this is to create new variables or data points from existing ones.

Consider a scenario where there is a desire to plot:

• market penetration, an existing variable (“Ever”) …
• against adoption rate, a new dimension created by dividing the result for “Monthly” by the result for “Ever”.

A typical workflow might be …

There are however potential problems with this approach:

1. If the output needs to be updated, for example when there is new data added, many if not all the steps need to be repeated.
2. If the output needs to be replicated for say different filters or scenarios, this too can involve repetition.
3. If the updates or replications are to be done by someone other than the original author, the need to find the right Excel Workbook and the right location within it can take up valuable time.

The Power of Having Everything Connected

These problems are instantly resolved by having your data, outputs, and workings housed and connected in one document, as you can do in Displayr.   Zooming out in this example we can see the following set up.

• A) Hidden tables for the two source questions, “Ever” and “Last Month”.
• B) A hidden calculation, dividing the results for “Last Month” by “Ever”, our adoption ratio.
• C) A Calculation Grid, extracting brands from A and B and linking data via cell references.
• D) A scatter-plot visualization linked to C.

There are also some filter controls top left and a dynamic date filter applied to all inputs so the analysis will always show the most recent quarter as the data is updated.

Hidden items (indicated by grey cross-hatch shading) means that the document editor can see the output but it will not be shown when published to a dashboard or exported to PowerPoint.

If someone comes to edit the document later the relationships are easily identified via Displayr’s dependency graph (right click on an item to find it).  The scatter plot is created from the summary table, the summary table is a combination of Q3 and the adoption calculation, and so on.  This addresses problem 3 noted earlier (difficulty in tracing workings when they are in a different place).

But the real benefits kick in when it comes to updating or replicating this output (problems 1 and 2).   It should be self-evident but watch in this video how seamless it is to create new versions of the framework via filtering and updating it with new data … even the footer descripting the sample date and size changes.

If you want to take a closer look and study the workings in detail, you can get a copy of this document here: Embedded Workings

Once you’ve tried embedding your workings in your report and have both linked directly to the source data, it’s very hard to go back to using external workbooks or sheets.

We are living in a highly dynamic world and today's business environment is changing rapidly. Market research surveys collect a huge amount of data, and static PowerPoint presentations just can't keep up with the pace. Data-driven dashboards are innovative and trending in market research. They enable you to study your data effortlessly and share a dashboard with a simple link.

A well-designed dashboard report can serve as an effective information management tool and a powerful means of sharing pertinent data at-a-glance. Dashboards hosted online, in particular tracking surveys, are an efficient way to present results to stakeholders or clients. You just need to add the new data, and your dashboard gets automatically updated. There is no need to create a new PowerPoint presentation.

Dashboards require planning

The planning phase is where it all begins. Once the scope of the dashboard project has been defined, the process of gathering requirements begins. Creating a dashboard that is simple to use and accessible is just one of the obvious requirements for today's forward-thinking businesses.

There are certain dashboard design key principles that you should follow to be sure the dashboard you design really stands out and is visually appealing. Poorly designed dashboards can fail to convey useful information and insights and even make the data less comprehensible.

Before jumping into the design stage of your dashboard project, you need to start with a plan that has clear objectives. Consider the five Ws:

Who: Who is the intended audience? Make a list of the stakeholders, decision-makers, and end-users of your dashboard.
What: What is the purpose of the dashboard? Create a list of objectives and ensure they are all met.
Where: Where does the data come from? Is it just survey data or in combination with other sources?
When: Does the dashboard show data for one specific time period, or does it require a periodic refresh. If the latter, when, and how frequently should the data be refreshed?
Why: Why do you need to develop the dashboard report?

Dashboard design principles

Ask yourself, what are the important things to keep in mind when designing a dashboard. On that note, let's enter the world of dashboard design and best practices.

Consider your audience

One of the most important principles, and the one that is often overlooked when designing a dashboard, is knowing your audience. It starts and ends with your audience. Who is going to use the dashboard? What will the users expect from this dashboard? You should never lose sight of the purpose of designing a dashboard because no one dashboard fits all types of audiences. In the same way that you would design a PowerPoint report, you are designing the dashboard because you want to present the survey data in a clear and concise way. A well-designed dashboard facilitates the decision-making process for the audience in mind. To that end, before diving headfirst into dashboard design, it is a good idea to sit with your end-users, gather requirements, and define the objectives.

From a business intelligence perspective, there are three common types of dashboards:

• Operational dashboards tell you what is happening now
• Strategic dashboards track key performance indicators
• Analytical dashboards contain large amounts of data created and used by analysts to provide support to executives

Outside of the business intelligence realm, dashboard designs can vary enormously and come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. What type of dashboard will work best for your data? The following blog post reviews eight types of online dashboards to assist you with choosing the right approach for your next dashboard.

Remember to put yourself in your audience's shoes.

Tell a clear story

A dashboard provides a snapshot of the data at a specific point in time. The metrics to include in the dashboard will depend on the type of study and objectives of the research. A good dashboard relies on simplicity. The metrics you choose and how you group those metrics should tell a holistic story. Letting the data do the talking is part of good storytelling.

The dashboard should present the findings in an intuitive way making it easy to use and understand. You should avoid clutter or confusing use of color. You don't want to end up losing your audience or cluttering your message.

When designing a dashboard, it’s important to follow some kind of organized structure. Use size and position to show hierarchies and make priorities clear. The inverted pyramid is a metaphor used by journalists to illustrate how information should be prioritized and structured. Simply put, the widest part of the upside-down triangle displays the most important, interesting, or attention-grabbing insights that need to be conveyed. The lower sections give context to these insights, illustrating other data in order of diminishing importance. By using this approach you are leveraging the natural reading pattern to present information in an intuitive manner.

As well as the placement of metrics, you also need to consider the visual consistency of the design, such as fonts, themes, and navigation. Maintaining consistency is absolutely key and equivalent to drafting an intuitive design. One thing is for sure, lack of consistency is likely to lead to a lack of interest!

It is always a good idea to include instructions on how to use the dashboard. Include narrative where necessary explaining what the data might mean. Both of these will support the audience who needs to use the information to make meaningful decisions.

Use the right data visualization

Choosing the right visualization for your dashboard and making sure your end-user understands what they’re looking at, is another important part of designing a dashboard.  Looking good is not the same as being effective, and visualizing data poorly can become more confusing than helpful.

In the first instance, you need to understand the reasons why you may need to use a particular type of chart. For instance, if you are comparing one or many variable sets, you need to use a comparison chart. Typical comparison charts include a bar, column, pie, line charts, and scatter plots. If you want to show the makeup of a total by category? To show composition you can use a pie chart, stacked bar and column charts, area, and waterfall charts. If you want to understand the distribution of your data, consider using a scatter plot. If you are analyzing trends then line and dual-axis line charts are obvious choices. Finally, if you want to better understand the relationship between two variable sets, you can use a scatter plot or a bubble chart.

Conclusion

Designing and creating a dashboard report is an iterative and evolving process. It is important to test, evaluate, and tweak your dashboards. User-driven feedback allows you to make your dashboard as effective as possible, and address the specific objectives of your audience.

By using these dashboard design best practices, you’ll guarantee that the dashboard you design will serve as an effective information management tool. In the end, it is about making clients and stakeholders understand their data, empowering them with data-driven insights.

1. Will you use a theme or specific colors?

Displayr has a set of Page Masters (similar to Slide Master layouts in PowerPoint). Likewise, you can customize these layouts with images, default colors, fonts, etc to give your dashboard a consistent design throughout. You can access these and create custom page layouts through Appearance > Page Master in the Ribbon. If you use similar themes throughout your dashboards, you can create templates to re-use when creating new documents as explained in our Creating Templates for Displayr Documents post. You can also Create Visualization Templates to stylize your visualizations in a standard way. You can customize colors and fonts, and even assign specific colors to brands/categories in your visualization.

2. Will you update the dashboard with a new wave of data?

More specifically, will you use visuals that compare different time frames or waves of data? If all you are going to do is update the dashboard, from preliminary data, with final data, then you are good to go. However, if you show time frames like the most recent wave, most recent 4 quarters, etc, you want to make sure to set up your variables and visuals to reference these time frames in an automated fashion. You want to avoid specifying month or quarter names verbatim when creating outputs. There are a few different ways to automate time frames. Within the Date/Time aggregation menu, you can set the Period Type to be Duration to get recent periods. You should also check out our Working with Dates interactive tutorial for other methods.

3. How do you want to set up the filtering?

Most dashboards incorporate some type of filtering of the data. Indeed, filtering is one of the most basic ways to make your dashboard interactive and interesting for the viewer. There are many different ways to incorporate filtering in your dashboard. You can filter the whole dashboard based on a set of Controls (combo boxes, list boxes, text boxes, etc) from one page or "share" those controls and filtering across all of the pages. If you'd like the viewer to be able to filter individual pages differently, you can duplicate Controls on each page and set up individual page filters or use our built-in filters toolbar at the top of your dashboard to filter individual pages. If you want to get really fancy, you can even filter the dashboard based on the viewer's login credentials. Do note, that if you want to take advantage of our filtered exporting feature, you will need to make sure your dashboard can be filtered using the page Filter dropdown toolbar in addition to any Controls you are using to filter. An important thing to note when using this feature is that the page you are filtering needs to contain all the relevant data on that page.

4. How will your viewers navigate your dashboard?

By default, all dashboards are exported with a navigation bar on the left. For a more cohesive design, you can customize the coloring and style of this to fit the theme of your dashboard using CSS as described here. You can also use CSS to hide the navigation bar altogether and instead use icons with links to have your viewers move around your dashboard.

5. How will you share your dashboard with others?

You can publish your dashboard as a Web Page to take full advantage of all of our dashboarding features. How you publish your dashboard is based on whether or not your dashboard is a Free or Professional document (Professional documents are noted on your Documents page). Free documents are able to be published publicly on the web and do not consume any viewing hours. Professional documents can be published either through a private link or by requiring the viewer login first to gain access, both of which will count towards your viewing hours. If you require your viewer to log in before accessing the dashboard, you can take advantage of other features like viewer-specific filtering and only allow viewers to look at certain pages within your dashboard. Outside having viewers access your dashboard directly, you can embed the dashboard on your own website as explained here. Furthermore, you can create a document with custom branding with a list of links to all of their dashboards. This is a clever way to whitelist access to their dashboards, rather than showing them a Documents list through Displayr. You can also add a search bar for your client to any dashboard that will search across documents the client as access to. To do so, under Export > Web Page > Advanced Options check Searchable from other company documents that can be viewed without a password.

As you can see, Displayr is extremely flexible when it comes to customizing the design of your dashboard. If you need help implementing any of these designs, don't hesitate to reach out to our global support team at support@displayr.com.

It is rare that somebody has all of these skills so you may need to get some help in one or more of these areas. In this post, as a graphic designer who has worked on many online dashboards, I use my experience to provide a set of guidelines to help you work with graphic designers. So, together you can make your dashboard beautiful and useful.

Step 1: Work out the scope of the engagement with your graphic designer

You can ask a graphic designer to do any of the following. You always need to be clear about what you want.

• Aesthetics: background images, colors, fonts, font sizes, borders, backgrounds, etc.
• Which chart types should be used?
• Design the UX or interaction experience.
  • How do users navigate (hyperlinks, tags, buttons)?
  • What types of interactions are possible with each page? E.g., filtering, printing.
  • What types of interactions are possible with each visualization? E.g., hover, selection, drag and drop, zoom.
• Create the overall plan for the dashboard. That is, work out which pages need to be created and what information is to be on each page.
• Create the dashboard from beginning to end, working with the end users, programming, manipulating data, etc.

Step 2: Create your brief

You will need a written brief for the graphic designer and the more specific the better. Although you may not want to cramp their creative style, this is not a good time to be vague. If you're not specific enough, things tend to not work out so well.

The brief needs to be specific about the following:

• The end-users of the dashboards. For example, perhaps the end-users are marketing managers wanting to understand what people are saying about their brands on Twitter.
• What success looks like. For example, the goal may be to have the marketing managers log in every day to see what has changed.
• Some inspiration. Your dashboard is ultimately a web page, so find examples of websites that you want your online dashboard to look like. Think about if you want a dark background, a photo or an image. Websites like awwwards and designmodo provide lots of inspiration. Keep in mind that some background images might be compromised by interactive graphics that change size.
• What you like. Provide examples of online dashboards that you think are good. The closer they are to what you are really going to build the better. For example, don't send a graphic designer a link to Poppy Field unless you have a lot of time and cash.
• What you expect the graphic designer to build on. For, example, if your goal is to just engage the dashboard designer to focus on aesthetics, you should ideally create the entirety of the dashboard to the best of your skills up front, and then give them the job of improving it.
• If your timing permits, break down the process into a series of stages. For example, first get the landing page right, then the first quarter of the pages, etc.
• Timings and processes:
  • Start date.
  • The date to receive the initial concepts from the graphic designer for the landing page.
  • When you want to receive initial concepts from the graphic designer for the other pages (often it may make sense for this to be after the landing page has been agreed on).
  • The date to receive final artwork after agreeing to concepts (or the final dashboard, if the brief is for the dashboard designer to build it).
  • The process for updates (e.g., of data, fixing problems). This is only important if the designer has responsibility for building the online dashboard.
• Any specific design preferences you have. For example, flat designs vs. 3D renders.
• The specifics and format of required outputs. For example, if you are getting a graphic designer to focus on aesthetics, this may be something like:
  • First, all concepts to be presented as JPGs or PDFs.
  • Final artwork to be presented as:
    • Backgrounds to pages: JPEGs 1024 by 700. These need:
      • Tell the story well. (Of course, you need to tell them the story as a separate part of the brief, for this to mean anything).
      • Be clean, clear, and interesting.
      • Work well with charts on top of them.
    • All other images to be provided as SVGs. For each pictograph, provide two images, one in the font color and one in the background color.
    • Fonts to be standard web fonts.

Step 3: Select a graphic designer

To confidently choose the right graphic designer, you need:

• Examples of online dashboards they have worked on.
• Referrals. This is particularly important if you are wanting them to do anything other than aesthetics.
• An understanding of their pricing.
• An understanding of their timing.

Word-of-mouth recommendations are ideal if you have the right network. Otherwise, there are lots of online services, such as UpWork.

If you are just focused on getting help with the aesthetics, all you probably need to do is find a graphic designer whose work you like. However, if time and money permit, it can be useful to try to get prototypes from a few different dashboard designers. This is more important if you have a large project or a pipeline of repeat business.

If you are wanting to have the graphic designer create the entire online dashboard, you probably want to tender the work and need to have multiples of $10,000 to spend.

Step 4: Remember, it is an iterative process

Nearly all design work is paid by the hour. This is not a task that works well with flat rate fees, except where the graphic designer has responsibility for doing everything. Next, I will walk you through a simple example, so you can understand what I mean by this. One of my colleagues gave me the brief of designing a landing page, which included the following example.

I got back to him with the following two options.

He didn't like either of them. After a bit of back and forth, and a whole lot of mind reading, I ended up creating the design below. Consequently, the key thing to appreciate is that getting to this final stage was always going to be iterative. In other words, there is no way he could have given me a brief that got me straight there. And, there is no way I could have got there without a lot of feedback.

Microsoft KPI

Overview: A one-page dashboard showing stock price and Google Trends data for Microsoft.

Interesting features: Automatically updated every 24 hours, pulling in data from Yahoo Finance and Google Trends.

View mode: Click here to see the dashboard.

Edit mode: Click here to see the underlying document.

Europe and Immigration

Overview: Attitudes of Europeans to Immigration

Interesting features: Based on 213,308 survey responses collected over 13 years. Custom navigation via images and hyperlinks.

View mode: Click here to see the dashboard.

Edit mode: Click here to see the underlying document.

Supermarket Brand Health

Overview: Usage and attitudes towards supermarkets

Interesting features: Uses a control (combo box) to update the calculations for the chosen supermarket brand.

View mode: Click here to see the dashboard.

Edit mode: Click here to see the underlying document.

Grocery Store NPS

Overview: Performance by department of grocery stores.

Interesting features: Color-coding of circles based on underlying data (they change when the data is filtered using the Filters menu in the top right). Custom navigation, whereby the user clicks on the circle for a department and gets more information about that department.

View mode: Click here to see the dashboard.

Edit mode: Click here to see the underlying document.

Blood Glucose Confection

Overview: Blood glucose measurements and food diary.

Interesting features: The underlying charts are fully automated, integrating data from a wearable blood glucose implant (internet of things) and a food diary. See Layered Data Visualizations Using R, Plotly, and Displayr for more about this dashboard.

View mode: Click here to see the dashboard.

Edit mode: Click here to see the underlying document.

Interactive infographic

Overview: An infographic that updates based on the viewer's selection of country.

Interesting features: Based on an infographic created in Canva. The data is pasted in from a spreadsheet  (i.e., no hookup to a database).

View mode: Click here to see the dashboard.

Edit mode: Click here to see the underlying document.

Presidential MaxDiff

Overview: A story-style dashboard showing an analysis of what Americans desire in their Commander-in-Chief.

Interesting features: The visualizations, text, and the underlying analysis (a MaxDiff model) all automatically update when a revised data file is imported (i.e., it is an automated report).

View mode: Click here to see the dashboard.

Edit mode:  Click here to see the underlying document.

Choice Simulator

Overview: A decision-support system

Interesting features: The simulator is hooked up directly to an underlying latent class model. See How to Create an Online Choice Simulator for more about this dashboard.

View mode: Click here to see the underlying document.

Edit mode: Click here to see the dashboard.

Military Aircraft

Overview: A map showing the number of military aircraft by country and the real-time position of some military aircraft.

Interesting features: The dashboard regularly scrapes the relevant information from the web. See How to Build a Geographic Dashboard with Real-Time Data for more about this dashboard.

View mode: Click here to see the underlying document.

Edit mode: Click here to see the dashboard.