Before you begin: This article outlines general and dashboard-specific best practices when building TapClicks dashboards. These guidelines help ensure dashboards are functional, readable, and aligned with client objectives.
General Best Practices
Understand the business goals
Identify the key metrics and data points provided by clients and align them with the business goals.
Keep it simple
Avoid cluttering the dashboards with unnecessary information. Stick to displaying the most important data that directly relates to the objectives. Less is more when it comes to dashboards.
Use visualizations
Organize dashboard elements using visualization techniques. Highlight the most critical information and use color, size, and placement to guide the client's attention. Make sure the visual hierarchy matches the priority of the data.
Choose appropriate visualizations
Select visualizations that best represent the data and make it easy for clients to interpret the information. Bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, and tables are highly recommended, but choose the ones that effectively communicate your data.
Use insights
Instead of just presenting the graphs and charts, use executive summaries and Media widgets to provide additional insights to the data.
Design for readability
Use a legible font size, appropriate font styles, and an adequate color palette to ensure readability. Avoid using too many different fonts or font sizes, as it can create visual confusion.
Use of interactive elements
Features like filters, drill-downs, and hover effects can enhance client engagement, but these should be used sparingly to add value without overwhelming the client.
Maintain consistency
Use consistent design elements, colors, and styles throughout your dashboards and sections to create a professional look. Consistency helps users navigate the dashboard more easily and understand the information better.
Use responsive design
Consider the different devices and screen sizes your dashboard will be viewed on. Design your dashboard to be responsive and adaptable to various screen sizes, ensuring a consistent experience across different devices.
Get feedback and improve
Gather feedback from peers and continuously refine your dashboard designs. Test it with representative users to identify usability and make improvements based on their feedback.
Best Practices to Create a Dashboard
Use brand-specific color palettes
Apply client-specific brand colors unless other requirements are provided.
Use an executive summary
Add an executive summary section to highlight key insights and trends. Summarize the contents of the report clearly. See the example executive summary below.
Place key metrics at the top
Display high-level KPIs first, followed by daily or weekly trends. Use graphs, charts, and funnel visualizations to add variation. Conclude with a detailed grid or overview.
Avoid repetitive data
Do not duplicate the same data across multiple widgets on a dashboard.
Avoid placing multiple metrics on a single chart
Displaying multiple metrics in one visualization can make data difficult to interpret. Use more simple charts instead.
Keep dashboards concise
Avoid overly long dashboards. Focus on clarity and relevance.
Use normalization when needed
When displaying multiple metrics in a single widget, enable the normalization feature to differentiate the axes. This option is available in the Styles tab. If normalization is enabled, legends may be turned off to avoid redundancy. For example, if both normalization and legends show the same data, remove one.
Collapse overflowing columns in grid widgets
If a grid widget contains more columns than can fit on the screen, enable the Collapse Overflowing Columns option. This displays extra metrics under a “Show More” option and avoids horizontal scrolling.
Delay iframe capture for image previews
If adding an image preview to a widget, add a 2–3 second delay for iframe capture to prevent broken images.
Use Media widgets for headers and styling
Media widgets can be used to create styled section headers and to add narrative context to dashboards. See examples below.
Use grid widgets for large data sets
Avoid creating visualizations for large data sets (e.g., campaigns, ads, or keywords), as they are often difficult to interpret. Instead, apply metric filters and use Top 3/5/10 settings. Grid widgets are typically clearer for comparing many items. In the image below, the grid widget on the right displays the Top 10 campaigns by impressions more effectively than the bar chart on the left.
Enable comparison on Big Number widgets
Instead of showing a single value, enable the Compare with Prior Period feature to help track progress over time.
Use heat maps in grids
Apply heat maps to grid widgets to make large data sets more visually accessible.
Assign sections to data sources
Use the Manage Sections menu to assign sections to a specific data source, channel, or product. This allows sections with no data to be automatically hidden.
Use dashboard-level filters
Enable the Expose as Dashboard Filter? option instead of adding the same filter to multiple widgets.
Use funnel charts when applicable
Funnel charts help provide a visual representation of progression or conversion across multiple steps.
Enhance pie charts by switching to donut plot
To change a pie chart to a donut chart, update the Plot Type setting to "Donut"
Sort grids by value
Sort grid widgets by the most valuable metric, such as impressions, clicks, or conversions.
Optimize for PDF output
PDF reports use a 14x12 block grid. Design layouts to avoid widget overlap or scrolling. Using a widget size of 11x12 blocks can help maintain compatibility across devices such as desktops and laptops.
Need Help? Reach out to Support
- Submit a support ticket at support.tapclicks.com or managed.services@tapclicks.com