Dashboard & Report Studio Design: Best Practices

General Best Practices

• Understand the business goals: Identify the key metrics and data points from 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, make use of executive summaries and Media widgets to add 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. 

• Usage of interactive elements: Elements 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 upgrade: Gather feedback from your peers and continuously iterate on your dashboard designs. Test it with representative users to identify usability and make improvements based on their feedback.

Best Practices to Create a Dashboard

• Select brand-specific color palettes unless clients have some other specific requirements.

• Make use of an executive summary to emphasize key insights and trends and summarize the contents of the report. (See an example executive summary below.)

• Always place the major key metrics at the top of the dashboard followed by daily/weekly trends (see image below). Then make better use of graphs/charts/funnels to add some texture to the dashboard and end with an overview/detailed grid with all the information.

• Avoid repetitive data on widgets when creating a dashboard.

• Avoid multiple metrics on a single chart which makes it difficult to interpret (see image below).
• It's better to have more, simple charts.

• Avoid lengthy dashboards; make them simple and to the point.

• Whenever there is a need to use multiple metrics on a visually representing widget, make use of the normalizing feature to differentiate the axes and normalize the metrics (see image below). Access the normalization feature in the Styles tab of a widget.

• When the normalization feature is enabled, the legends can be turned off to avoid redundancy. In the image below, both normalization and legends are enabled which display the same information twice. Avoid this redundancy by removing any of those you see fit.

• If a grid widget has more columns than are able to fit on a page, enable the collapse overflowing columns option to avoid scrolling. In the image below, the grid widget has more columns than fit, so enabling the collapse overflowing columns option makes the widget look good and compacts those extra metrics as “Show More”.

• If an image preview is added on a widget, make sure to add 2-3 seconds of Delay for iframe capture to avoid image breaks.

• Make use of Media widgets for header stylings and insights. This adds more value to the dashboards. Media widgets enable you to create headers like the examples below.

• Avoid creating graphs/charts on larger data sets (i.e., campaigns, ads, keywords) which will result in hard-to-interpret results. Instead, make use of metric filters and set the widgets as Top 3/5/10.
  
  In the image below, compare the bar chart to the grid widget style. The bar chart on the left has all the campaigns but is hard to decipher. On the right, the grid widget is clear in displaying the Top 10 Campaigns by impressions, which is easier to understand than the graph.

• When using the big number widget, instead of displaying the current value, enable compare with the prior period to add more value to the data. In the image below, comparing the prior period on KPIs helps clients to track the progress from prior week/month data.

• Use the heat map feature on grid widgets to make data more colorful and easier to interpret (see image below).

• Always assign the sections to the data source/channel/product to automatically hide the empty sections. You can assign a data source section by clicking the More Options icon (i.e. three dots) at the top of a Dashboard and Manage Sections.

• Make use of the Expose As Dashboard Filter? option to avoid widget-level filtering.

• Use a funnel chart style to provide more information visually.

• If a pie chart looks boring, then adjust the Inner radius setting to somewhere between 50-80 to get a donut chart.

• Always sort the grid widget by the most valuable metric.

• Every slide of a PDF contains 14x12 blocks. Optimize the use of that space to avoid overlapping or scrolling. Consider device type and screen size.

• Using 11x12 blocks for widgets (see image below) will avoid unwanted scrolling while still being able to fit across various devices (i.e., desktop, tablets and laptops).