InetSoft Webinar: Designing Good Looking Dashboards

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Building a Winning Dashboard" The speaker is Abhishek Gupta, sales engineer at InetSoft.

And the last lesson for designing good looking dashboards is number seven, content is king. This goes for anything. The long-term success and adoption of the dashboard is really determined by the strength of this content, not the brightness of its color. Go beyond showing the trivial and solving simple problems to taking a stab at the complicated problems. Those are the problems that dashboards should be solving.

These are the conversations that you should be having during the meetings. When you are designing dashboards, there are the basics that you want to have. You don't want to have the debate around colors and effects, much more on the content of the dashboard. Dashboard should really serve to elevate your discussions and you can think of it as going from an old and classy TV to a high-definition screen.

The enhanced resolution does not necessarily make people look better or simply enhance their appearance. We can just ask newscasters and the makeup artists. The additional visual power simply exposes more information, whether it is flattering or not, so the conversation you have about your data should take advantage of this extra power and enhance precision.

So let's summarize what we have learned about designing effective good-looking dashboards. To get adoption for a dashboard, we need to look at relevance, integration, and design. Relevance, you want to put the focus on people and give them choices. For integration, you want to make dashboard a part of a system that you already have in place, and you want to maybe integrate with an email notifications or any other mechanism that you can use to push that into their workplace environment.

For design, you want to show the data and do not distort it. You want to show context, add detail. Decorate as little as possible, make every pixel count, and take answers as far as you can and remember that content scheme. Now, I hope this has given you a better understanding of dashboards and perhaps some new ideas about how they can be used more effectively.

One more point I want to mention here is that you want to make sure you have the right tools to track your adoption rates. Here's an example of a dashboard, which comes built in with InetSoft's BI platform, and this allows the administrators to track the users and dashboard adoption. So they can actually understand, which dashboards are being used.

Which users are using those dashboards? How long are the dashboards are being viewed? How active are the users are in the systems in terms of how often they log in? This one really gives you the tool to understand which dashboards you may be want to fine tune their design. Maybe the content of the dashboard is not strong enough.

Maybe you want to find better ways to push the dashboard system to the users. Maybe you want to open capabilities to the users who are very active in the system, so a great way to understand how successful your implementation are just by being able to track your adoption. So, I hope this gave you a good understanding of some of the best practices we use to increase our dashboard adoption.

Read what InetSoft customers and partners have said about their selection of Style Scope for their solution for dashboard reporting.

We are getting close to the end of this, so we will open up the floor for some questions, but if you are interested to know more about InetSoft and how you can use it to create your own dashboard, you are welcome to contact our team, and you'll be able to get a live way walk through or simply just try it yourself if you wanted to.