According to Stephen Few, an author of Information Dashboard Design, a dashboard is a visual display of the most important information that need to reach one or more purposes, organized on a single screen, thus, could be monitored at a glance (as cited in Tyson, 2016). Tyson (2016) mentioned that the dashboard should be easily read at a glance, and encourage action. Determining the audience and their needs is the first fundamental dashboard design principle. It is paramount to understand who will use the dashboard and what the most important metrics that will lead to the action. On the other word, the readability and action-ability of the selected metrics is paramount.
In order to create a dashboard that easy to read and inspires to action, I changed the Magnolia Community Dashboard with regard to its …show more content…
Organizing data based on priority. I organized the charts’ positions based on the Western world behavior to read from the top left to the top right and ending at the bottom right corner. Thus, I put the most prioritize graphs at the top left (residents reach and proficient reading) as the big picture of the CMI progress.
4. Inspiring action by visualization. The purpose is to display data that encourage action and reduce any visualization that build more complexity. In other word: keep it simple and actionable. For that reason, I displayed:
a. The goal and some important numbers at the beginning and the end of the chart, instead of display all numbers at every points;
b. Trend by using line chart that focus on recent data (2013) with a consistent period of time (quarterly data) and displayed comparison data as necessary in order to emphasize any work progress differences in Magnolia Partner Settings and in the community overall (for example: Sharing Book Behavior graph);
c. Period over period increase/ decrease using up-green/ red-down triangle signs (for example: Residents Reached and Third-Graders Proficient Reading