UX Anatomy of Dashboards
Even though the future of BI is in putting data to work rather than putting it on screen, dashboards are and will be omnipresent in today’s, and most likely tomorrow’s, businesses. At GoodData, in the process of designing a product to guide our users through creating great dashboards, we have deconstructed hundreds of dashboards and BI applications designed by our team to understand them well enough for the task. This post shares the anatomy we have developed as well as some of the key learnings.
Building dashboards is, on many levels, similar to building a house — it could be built from individual bricks, assembled from prefabricated components such as entire walls or even entire blocks representing individual rooms. The larger the building block, the faster the building is, with less potential for design and construction errors but also less flexibility. An experienced architect and construction company can design and build a great functional house from bricks, but unlike houses, which are commonly designed by professional architects, most dashboards are not designed and built by professionals in the field of information design and UX — and this is not necessarily a bad thing.
