The Art of Creating Dashboard Apps

Conceptual and Practical Examples

A dashboard is a graphical user interface that consolidates and simplifies complex data as well as provides a visual presentation of various key performance indicators (KPIs) as charts, tables, or interactive elements.

KPIs are critical metrics that measure the ability of organizations in achieving its strategic objectives, whether it be revenue growth, customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, or team performance. In simple terms, KPIs are numbers that may make or break businesses or operations.

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Why dashboards?

Traditional data tables are great at organizing and giving data logical structure, however they often fail to fully capture the story behind the numbers.

Visual representations of KPIs — through charts, graphs, and interactive elements — reveal hidden patterns, relationships, and trends that may otherwise remain buried in rows and columns of tabular data. This transformation from raw data to visual representation serves as the first step toward making sense of data.

When these visual elements and data tables are thoughtfully arranged on a dashboard canvas, they create an intuitive interface that…