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Dashboard Principles - Design a Better Dashboard Part 1

About this Tutorial

One of the best examples of a dashboard I got from a great talk on just totally like SASS dashboards, and they talked about the speedometer and why the speedometer is such a great dashboard is that it is it encapsulates all of the principles of what goes into a great dashboard.

Video Transcript

 Hello welcome to Dashboard Principles. This is going to be the first of a few parts of design, a better dashboard. We're gonna be dealing just with dashboards. This first video is all about principles. Then in the next video I'm gonna share with you a few of the features that we're gonna be building.

I'll talk through them, and then in the third video we'll actually go and build a dashboard to begin. One of the best examples of a dashboard I got from a great talk on just totally like SASS dashboards, and they talked about the speedometer and why the speedometer is such a great dashboard is that it is it encapsulates all of the principles of what goes into a great dashboard.

Here, let me show you, shows you in real time how fast the car is going. When you press on the gas pedal or on the brake, there is some real time. Difference here, you can see the difference viscerally. You can feel the difference, but you can actually see your speed go from one 40 to one 20 to 100 to 80 as you break.

And also it tells you the information you need to know at the exact time. It shows up the engine light check engine light when you need to check the engine. Not sooner. It doesn't have a place for you to even see that everything's okay because you sh know everything's okay. It only shows you the information you need.

If your gas is running low, it immediately tells you. It doesn't tell you when the gas is out. It tells you when you need to know. You need to fill up. And this speedometer shows you. Everything you need to know at the exact moment you need to know and everything, need to know in order to drive the car other than actually physically driving it.

I think it puts together these four great principles, these four principles, really great. One is it leads the eye where to look on a speedometer. You don't need to be told that this is speed. You know that just by this label down here, you know it's speed, but even then you don't need to know you.

You physically don't need to be told this is the speed, because you can see that it is the speed. You use this speedometer all the time and almost it comes background information, but it's useful background information, get out of the way. It only has exactly what's necessary. It has nothing else.

It doesn't sit in your view. It actually sits a little bit outside of your. When you need to look at it, you can find it. You need to actually avert your eyes to actually drive, so you're not using the dashboard to drive, to turn to see oncoming traffic. A dashboard as well is it's not the pedals, it's not the steering wheel, the key, like it is just the thing you use to do all of those things.

So it stays out of you until you need to see it. And then, What it does show you and the speedometer is, it's a little odd, but it shows you the exact data that you need to know, like the exact speed that you were going, but as you change it also, Visually tells you the difference, right? If I need to decrease my speed and I hit the brake, it shows me it goes, I can see the speedometer go down.

So I know that it's going down. I have seen the change and I see that comparison. So a good dashboard board leads the eye to the right information. It only shows exactly what's necess. It stays out of you as you actually do the thing you're trying to do. So you're not using it to do the thing, you're using it to measure.

And then when you're measuring, you're seeing two things. You're seeing the data, but you're also seeing the comparison or the change or delta some type of difference between the data as you do different things. We're gonna go. More into features, but I wanna share with you one thing, like here's where, like you get some data, right?

And a chart might, not a chart, but a table might look like this. You might even have multiple charts like March, April, may and yes, you can look at each of these individual data points and see differences, but you want to be able to see some total, some summarization. You want to be able to see.

In shapes and colors the differences between this, these numbers, and you wanna see like the numbers that are gonna help you take a, from a top level view. If this is for instance, as sales reps, how many calls they're making, how many sales they're doing, how much revenue, and then you have some sort of like derivative like revenue per sale, calls per day, their speed.

You have these things. All available to you in data, but really we want to be able to see these side by side maybe again, in shapes and be able to measure it and also see if there's any changes month to month. There's a lot of stuff we wanna do, and we'll do that. Soon. But first, in the next video, I'm gonna talk about a few of the features that we're going use that I don't know if you've ever seen before.

They're rather nude for me and they're fun creative ways to build dashboards and not charts, but yeah, dashboards and see data come alive. All right, bye.