Recently, Nancy Duarte participated in an interview with Jimmy Guterman of the MIT Sloan Management Review, which resulted in the article “How to Become a Better Manager By Thinking Like a Designer” (sign up is required). The quote that summarizes the article is:

“Often managers… rely heavily on data and information to tell the story and miss the opportunity to create context and meaning…leaving lots of room for interpretation, which can spawn multiple cycles and limit advancement.”

It’s the same with information presentation. A focus on design at the beginning expands the ability to deliver context and meaning. But before you discount design as a concept for well, you know, “those artsy types”, keep in mind, as Nancy puts it:

“Design is… crafting communications to answer audience needs in the most effective way.”

What this means is that the more you focus on design, the more you’ll “speak” to your audience – which means you’ll be more effective with your data presentation. It’s about the audience, not you.

Here are some dashboard design principles that we use (with a few enhancements from Nancy’s interview) to make sure we become better information presenters by thinking like designers:

• Unity/Harmony – a sense that everything in the application belongs together, resulting in a “whole” that is greater than the sum of the parts. All the elements complement, augment, and enhance, as opposed to distract and detract from each other.
  

  Takeaway: Identify the problem you’re solving and make sure every element you place moves you closer to answering that question.

• Proximity/Hierarchy – Things that are near each other are related. Hierarchy demonstrates relationships between items where appropriate. Proximity and Hierarchy both provide tremendous contextual cues leading to better understanding.
  

  Takeaway: Place related things near each other and separate unrelated things. Remember, dogs and cats don’t play well together.

• Clear Space – White space in information display is very important and too often overlooked. Maximizing dashboard real estate means creating places for the eye to “rest” so that the non-white space is more effective.
  

  Takeaway: Use white space in conjunction with proximity to help your viewers follow the story the information is telling.

• Balance – Dominant focal points either give the viewer a sense of comfort (balanced) or spur them to action (unbalanced). Nancy points out “that does not mean all things must be in balance all the time. It is often effective to jar people and thereby effect a change in behavior or thought. Be aware, though, that once something has been thrown out of balance, it is the nature of the universe to find a new state of equilibrium.”
  

  Takeaway: Make sure the primary focal points in your information presentation tell the viewer either “it’s ok, move on” or “you need to do something.”

• Contrast – Contrast creates interest to focus attention or highlight differences. Again quoting from the article “The value of contrast lies neither in the black nor the white, but in the tension between them.”
  

  Takeaway: Use Contrast to shift Balance so the viewer focusses and acts more quickly.

• Proportion – More important elements deserve more real estate. It’s tempting to want to present an unbiased view of the data. However, as Amanda Cox of the NYT graphics department stated at the OEDC “Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge” “data isn’t like your kids, you don’t have to pretend to love them equally.”
  

  Takeaway: Increase the size and emphasis of the values and decrease the size of labels and you’ll find dramatically better impact and speed of understanding.

• Simplicity – Stay focused on the specific fact on which you’re trying to shine light. This sometimes means showing less data and a simpler display. I think Garr Reynolds sums it up best: “Don’t confuse ’simplicity’, which is hard to achieve, with ’simplistic’, which is easy and usually lacking value.”
  

  Takeaway: Help your viewers focus on what’s really important by pointing them to the kernels and not the chaff.

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The “discipline” argument is made forcefully by Avinash Kaushik (among others).

“if your dashboard does not fit on one page, you have a report, not a dashboard…This rule is important because it encourages rigorous thought to be applied in selecting the golden dashboard metric.”

I buy wholeheartedly into the value of constraints. However, defining a useful constraint as a “rule” assumes there is only one viable means to achieve the desired ends. Confining visual real estate is but one way to focus your thinking. There are others: How about limiting yourself to five key measures? How about demanding that a dashboard can be understood in 3 minutes by a new user? How about only presenting exceptions?

The argument that a one-page dashboard necessarily provides an view of your business “at a glance” is more self-deceiving. Well-known information-ista Stephen Few uses this rationale in his definition of a dashboard:

A visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance. PDF

I check my speedometer “at a glance”. I “glance” at a Heads-up Display (HUD) on a video game showing how much energy my character has remaining. These displays communicate but a single number that is already hovering on the corner of my consciousness. If we follow this advice literally, we’d show:

Assuming one page gives you quick, easy comprehension is like assuming all red cars are fast. That’s simply not true. It must be duly noted, however, that all red cars are cool.

More often, people follow the one-page dashboard rule off a cliff like these folks.

There are real problems with this definition:

• In reality, the one-page rule leads to jamming information into the available space.
• When everything must fit on a page, there isn’t room to describe the connections between information or fashion a story from the data.
• A good dashboard raises more questions than it can answer. Sticking to a static piece of paper limits any ability to find or present explanations.

Don’t get me wrong: A one-page dashboard is often an effective way to create “a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives.” But with streaming video, interactive visualizations, podcasts, Kindles, smart phones, video projectors…is it really necessary to limit ourselves to 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper. Or might we open ourselves up to some more creative solutions to sharing the numbers; a short movie, a few slides, a short text narrative, or 140 characters.

I’d like to use this definition instead and will be back soon with some ideas on how to make your dashboards clear and concise.

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