Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

This book is a great introduction to info dashboards: lots of pro- and counter-examples quicky convey the point of what makes a good information dashboard.

In this book, Mr. Few highlights the common design mistakes of dashboard design and provides tools to enable the audience to easily get the relevant information quickly.

Stephen draws from psychology to define best practices for organizing business information in a way that elevates accurate interpretation. He promotes the use of Bar graphs for clearly displaying information, while demonstrating that our human parallel processing of our eyes and brains do not effectively interpret quantitative scale using pie charts or radar graphs.

The book insightfully shares that Dashboard Design has different forms depending on the different role of which it will be used. Few classifies Information Dashboard into three types relative to the Role:

*Strategic Purposes: The primary use today is the Executive Dashboard that provides a quick overview that decision makers need to monitor the health and opportunities of the business.

*Analytical Purposes: Require more context behind the numbers, including meaningful comparisons, historical background and more specific performance evaluators.

*Operational Purposes: Monitors Operations that are continuously changing and may require immediate attention. Operation Dashboards require the most specific and highest level of detail, but must also be clear and simple for the audience to understand quickly what needs to be done.

Before this book, few people knew to differentiate Dashboard Design according to the role the information will be used for - Strategic, Analytical or Operational.

Another key takeaway is to avoid fragmenting data sets that share relationships. Stephen argues grouping interrelated together on a single screen can tell a more complete story. Mr. Few says of Information Dashboards, "simultaneity of vision that it offers: the ability to see everything that you need at once. This enables comparisons that lead to insights-".

Information Dashboard Design is a must read for presenters of information at all levels of the organization. Stephen Few provides practical lessons on how to raise audience comprehension of the data and make your meetings more valuable.

Stephen Few has 20 years of expertise in the field of data visualization and is an MBA professor at Haas Business School, UC Berkeley.

This book is very nicely written in easy to understand manner. The format and layout of the content itself communicates importance of visual aspects at core.
Usage of colors and presentation of data are eye openers for BI Professionals like me. I mean, most of these years after seeing all those animated charts and sweet looking dashboards (from all big BI vendors), the real meaning was somewhere had been lost. I think this book is must read for everyone who needs to present data, and not only for people who design Dashboard.
THIS IS PRACTICAL!

Really interesting book...especially if you are looking around to find sth like this...I was really lost in looking for dashboards, but this book made an impact. I propose it to anyone that has any relationship with dashboards!!

This is a good book for those who need a better understanding of what constitutes a quality (visual) information dashboard. It doesn't get bogged down in useless details, focusing instead on the primary design factors (e.g. use of grapics, layout and space, text typeface and emphasis) which will help you to create a USEFUL and used info dashboard. The book itself is well designed (as one would expect) and the author's tone is casual and concise. Ample illustrations and images provide examples of the Dos and Don'ts so you can readily understand the design guidelines the author advocates.

Most of the book focuses on the visual aspects of info presentation with some useful forays into areas such as proper requirements/measurements gathering and different user types. Little of the book is on the "back-end" or deep business needs/uses of informational dashboards.

I think the book is well written, wise, and should be required reading for any developer who finds themselves working on an information dashboard or other data presentation project. Readers looking for more business case background or data-wrestling info will need other books but should consider reading this one to make sure all their hardwork doesn't result in a turd of a final presentation/project deliverable.