Dashboard Redesign: Understanding Purpose

Applying basic design principles, Part 6: A look at how dashboard purpose and content intersect.

This article is part of a series that illustrates how basic design principles can improve information display. The previous installments focused on understanding the audience and context for your chart, and its core purpose. Here, we will take a look at how those considerations affect content decisions for the dashboard that we began redesigning in part 2.

A slightly cleaned up version of the dashboard from Part 2, showing performance statistics.

As a first step toward redesigning the charts and information display, today, we’re going to focus on understanding the audience and purpose for this dashboard. Let’s take a look at a few key questions to better understand what we should consider in our dashboard redesign.

• Who is your user?
• Why are they interested in what you have to say?
• In what context will they see your visualization?
• Where are they coming from, and how is their experience likely to affect their response to your ideas?
• What is your purpose for this chart?
• What are you trying to accomplish, create, or convey?

Of course, we’re not the creators of the original dashboard, so we’ll have to make…