Cheat Book for

Designing Beautiful Data

Dashboards

White Paper
 www.verbdata.com

As the software market continues to get more competitive

with emerging tools to help improve strategies, businesses
are pressured to make assertive and efficient decisions to
increase productivity and increase revenue. To do this, they
must leverage a powerful tool — data.

The main purpose of a dashboard is to provide valuable

information to ease the decision-making process at a glance.
Today, leading companies spend vast amounts of time and
money honing in on the skills of product managers. An optimal
and efficient dashboard design is a clear reflection of this
investment. An effective and optimal dashboard should be
able to answer the most frequently asked questions relevant
to the user within five seconds. But how do we get
dashboards to higher efficiency levels and how do we ensure
an optimal design?

Does your dashboard answer

the most frequently asked questions
in five seconds?
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Defining a Data Purpose

Ensuring your dashboard provides valuable data is paramount

for the success of your business projects. Instead of cramming
as much information as possible into one grid, make sure your
dashboard becomes an asset to your company by providing
valuable insights relevant to your team’s needs.

The first step to building an optimal and effective dashboard is

to define its purpose. For this, you must fully understand the
needs and tasks of the end-user. A walk-through of
day-to-day will help identify crucial goals and key metrics for
an effective data-driven dashboard. Various users can benefit
from the data presented in many different ways. That is why
knowing the “why” – or context – is key for successful
dashboard implementation.
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Sourcing Data

Too much information can easily overwhelm your end-user.

Therefore, a simple-data story with main points available
immediately will simplify your customer’s tasks. This rule will
help your users find the answers to their questions at a glance
and increase dashboard usage.

For your dashboard to add value, it’s essential to understand

what type of data your customer needs and where to source
it.

Centralized Data Source

Bringing all of the necessary data into a centralized source is
critical for the performance of the dashboards – and it allows
you to combine disparate data sets. The main purpose of
centralizing your data or using a data lake source is to enable
you to connect different data sets to a single source without
heavily manipulating your database. This way, the
dashboard's performance will not be compromised as users
pull the necessary reports from sources other than your
production database for reporting purposes.
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Reset APIs Pub/Sub Events & Data Lakes & Databases

Message Queues Warehouses

Verb Data Experience Platform

Curated Data
Lake

Model

Transform

Segment

Data
Warehouse

Visualization Reports Message:

Alerts
Digests

Your Application

Email Slack API

SDK

Dashboard HTML Auth Endpoint Request Dashboard

via js snippet
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Type of Dashboard

To help organize and structure information, there are three

main types of dashboards to meet a business’ needs based
on the type of data required.

Operational: Time-sensitive reports,

such as statuses and real-time traffic on
an app or a site, alerting users of any
abnormalities to be addressed.

Analytical: Comparing data to past

50 60 70 performances to analyze trends and help
forecast. This type of dashboard is
usually represented by graphs for a clear
view, targeting teams’ actionable data.

Strategic: Display critical KPIs to help

leaders properly analyze performance
over a certain period.
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
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Optimal Dashboard Layout

An optimal dashboard layout allows for a clear data

hierarchy. This means that the most newsworthy data should
be visible at the top and take up the maximum space. With
this layout in mind, the user can start with the big picture upon
opening a dashboard and immediately allows context,
significantly saving time.

Inverted pyramid Dashboard desing

Most important
Overview How are we
information doing?

Supporting
Breakdown what's
information
happening?
Other Explore
details How can i
learn more?

Additionally, an optimal dashboard must continually monitor

response and loading times. This is a clear indicator of how
useful added features can be when implemented in a design.
Yet, if the loading time is too long, the dashboard loses value,
and its users will most likely turn to other tools to find the
information they need. It’s necessary to analyze and allocate
the time needed to manage any ongoing maintenance
required to reduce any potential impact on a dashboard’s
performance.
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Customer Collaboration

By providing a valuable data story, you’re allowing your

dashboard to become a valuable business asset for your
customers.

When building a customer-facing dashboard, what better

way to provide transparency and insights to your end-users
than to allow your customers to collaborate on its creation.

This approach hones many benefits:

Increase customer engagement by providing a valuable data

story, allowing your dashboard to become a valuable business
asset for your customers. This engagement can later be
measured through usage rate, indicating how often your
dashboard is referred to.

Drive active collaboration to make way for potential new

data to add even greater value to your customers. The more
your customer’s business grows, the easier you can to expand
your reach and grow your own business.
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Design Implementation

The design phase consists of planning the blueprint for your

dashboard and architecting the data model to know how you
will build your dashboard’s functionality and source the data.

There are three main types of expenses to keep in mind when

estimating the cost of dashboards for implementation:

Time and resources estimate: As dashboards become

heavily used across industries, there’s an even greater need
for teams to develop new skills, mostly seen within data
scientists, to engineer and analyze dashboards. We must
consider the speed at which teams learn and develop new
skills.

Materials: The cost of materials is highly dependent on your

architecture, but a good dashboard needs a centralized data
store that is not the production database to help transform
and move data quickly, and a data warehouse to
pre-aggregate your data.

Opportunity: Comparing a set of features that your team can

build in the same amount of time as a dashboard will take to
implement depends on the value that the features create for
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business because every business’s value proposition is

different, so your product strategy must align with that.

When thinking of adding new features to your existing

dashboard, you must always prioritize performance. This
means that new features will most likely require additional
updates to your database and how you source that
information. They may cost extra time and engineering hours
which can be difficult to estimate. Additionally, if your new
feature requires a schema change, the data that supports said
dashboard must be updated, slowing down the feature
release process.
 www.verbdata.com

Measure a Dashboard’s success

In short, an ideal dashboard helps make your end user’s tasks
simple and aids the decision-making process, all at a glance.

But how do you measure your dashboard’s success?

Usage rate: Scanning the back-end users and analyzing the

frequency in which they visit the dashboard helps you
understand how useful and helpful the data displayed is for
their tasks. A high usage rate is a great indicator of a
successful dashboard.

Response time: If the data is taking too long to load on a

dashboard, this can interrupt a user’s flow and cause them to
lose their attention. You can avoid this by reducing the input
dataset size or adding master filters.

If you seek to increase productivity or improve your team’s

processes by saving them time, Verb can help your dashboard
become a business asset. Want professional help to start
building your dashboard?

Get started today by requesting a demo or talking to a data expert.

Cheat Book for Designing Beautiful
Data Dashboards

www.verbdata.com

White Paper