Dashboard Redesign: A Look at Chart Choices

Applying basic design principles, Part 7: Reviewing decisions on chart type and purpose

This article is part of a series that illustrates how basic design principles can improve information display. In the last installment, we thought through the purpose and context for a dashboard that we are redesigning. Up next, we will dive into revamping the content. Today, we’ll examine the charts themselves.

Before beginning a redesign, it’s good practice to take a moment to pause and look closely at the original chart choices to get a sense of what is (and isn’t) working well. We laid out some good, basic considerations for optimizing the styling of chart displays in a previous post, so here we’ll focus more on applying those recommendations in context and commenting on the charts that were used in the dashboard we began redesigning in Part 2. First, we’ll look closely at individual chart choices, and then we’ll step back to see how they work together as a whole.

Do the chart choices make sense?

The designer of this dashboard has stuck mostly with bar charts, which are familiar to most people, have high quantitative accuracy, and can support users in comparing values and proportions. In general, this is a good, safe choice…