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Dashboard Design: 10 Best Practices for An Amazing User Interface

July 12, 2023

Mile Zivkovic

Are you stuck trying to figure out the ideal dashboard design? It's as simple as following these 10 proven tips for creating intuitive dashboard designs.

Dashboards are an excellent way to communicate a lot of data at once. They can help you and your customers understand the data behind a product or a website and they’re popular for a reason. However, not everyone knows how to create a good dashboard, despite the many templates available in popular tools.

Today, we’re going to show you the best practices for creating amazing dashboard designs. No matter if you’re a newbie in the world of data visualization or a seasoned pro, there is something of value for everyone.

Why does good dashboard design matter?

Dashboards are inherently visual by nature. Instead of raw numbers and data, they show visualizations in different shapes and forms to tell a story. We read and interpret dashboards more easily thanks to their visual aspect.

Having said that, choosing what to visualize, how, and where can be tricky. A good dashboard tells a story with just the right data points and metrics and does not overwhelm the intended audience.

Get the design right, and the end-user (your customer or someone from upper management) will immediately understand the data behind the dashboard. Get it wrong, and they will leave the dashboard even more confused than when they opened it.

With years of experience in embedded analytics dashboards, we prepared some of the best tips for dashboard design for you.

Tip 1: Consider the target audience

Imagine you’re writing a book about how trains work. Would you write it the same way for a 25-year-old machine engineering graduate and a 10-year-old child?

The same goes for dashboards. The first and most important factor is who reads the dashboard. The CEO of the company, the marketing manager and a customer using a product require a different set of metrics and KPIs in a dashboard to be useful.

The general rule of thumb for the dashboard mockup process is that the more important the person reading is, the simpler the dashboard should be to read and interpret.

Tip 2: Lead with the goals

A good dashboard tells a story and every story needs a main character. In our case, the main character is the main goal you’re pursuing as a business or the main goal for your customers.

For example, a SaaS sales dashboard should lead with revenue as the main goal. Alternatively, it could be a handful of metrics such as conversion rate, lifetime value, monthly recurring revenue and others.

saas sales dashboard example

These goals should be front and center of your dashboard and the person reading them should see them immediately. There is something called a 5-second rule, where the reader should be able to get to the most important information within 5 seconds. In this case, that is the dashboard goal.

Tip 3: Choose your KPIs and metrics

Choosing the right KPIs is like going to an amazing restaurant and picking a dish to order. However, there is one key difference - your KPIs and metrics serve a purpose and they solve user needs. You should choose those that best reflect the goal described in the previous step.

For example, if revenue is your most important goal, there are a handful of metrics to include for that goal in your sales management dashboard, such as:

  • New conversions
  • Conversions from a free trial to a paid account
  • Cost per acquisition
  • Cost per click
  • And similar metrics

These should be the supporting characters in your story and they should be easily visible close to the top of your dashboard. If you don’t know which metrics to choose, just think of the ones that are the most important for achieving the main goal(s).

Tip 4: Add insights and create context around relevant data

It can be tempting to load your SaaS dashboard up with various visualizations and let the person reading interpret the data the best that they can. This is one approach but you can do even better than that.

Besides each chart, graph, or table, add just a sentence or two explaining what the values represent and what kind of a change it is compared to the previous period. This leaves no room for interpretation and adds tons of value to your dashboard, especially if the dashboard data refreshes in real-time.

If you use Luzmo, you can use tooltips to add this context and make the dashboard more valuable. The tooltips are hidden away in the normal dashboard view and the reader can click a button to expand the text and view the extra information.

Example of a good dashboard design

If your intended audience does not have the time to sift through all the visualizations, a few sentences of summary can make a world of difference. Also, you may be dealing with an audience that does not know how to interpret data, which is why the commentary can be crucial.

Tip 5: Don’t go crazy with colors

Once again, this is an issue of too much choice. You can make your dashboard super colorful and vivid, but should you really?

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a colorful dashboard in Luzmo

The best well-designed dashboards stick to two or three main colors for all visualizations and it’s for a good reason. It allows for consistency when viewing data and it’s easier for the person reading to understand the values without going into too much detail. Just as importantly, it’s not straining on the eyes and it won’t make your designer cringe upon opening the dashboard.

For example, if you show a category in multiple charts, you can give it the same color in all of those charts. Let’s say you use a traffic light system (red, yellow and green) to communicate progress on targets. If you use this system, make sure it’s repeated throughout the dashboard.

Last but not least, remember that white space is a designer’s friend. Use some of it to space apart your visualizations and increase the usability of your dashboard.

Tip 6: Make your dashboard interactive

One of the dashboard design best practices you should follow is to make the dashboards interactive so that the person reading them can get the information they need with a few clicks.

Let us explain. This means giving the viewer an option to change what the data looks like. For example, choosing a different time frame for the data, highlighting a specific metric, hiding the widgets they don’t find useful and more.

For example, you can have a social media dashboard that allows the end user to drill down into data and select specific platforms (e.g. LinkedIn) to see the conversions coming from them.

With Luzmo, you can trigger an action directly from the dashboard, which is useful for SaaS brands. For example, if you report on email marketing, you can trigger an action from Luzmo to your email marketing tool to see which segments of your audience are most active.

This kind of integration allows you to save time and more importantly, see relevant data in real-time.

In short, it’s about giving the end-user the ability to see the KPI dashboard on their own terms. 

PS. you can do this with Luzmo: besides creating your own dashboards for your product, you can let your end-users create their own dashboards with our embedded analytics dashboard editor.

Tip 7: Use the right type of visualization

Great dashboard software such as Luzmo has a multitude of options for visualizing data. You can use different types of visualizations to illustrate one and the same dataset, which is why it’s crucial to choose the ones that make the most sense for your audience.

For example, pie charts seem to be a favorite among many people, but they are actually not that useful. It’s difficult to assess which chunk of the pie is bigger just by eyeballing it, which can lead to unnecessary confusion. Also, if you have many different data types, the slices of the pie can get so small that it’s hard to see what is what.

avoid using pie charts if you want great dashboard design

And then, there are various chart types to choose from.

Bar charts and line charts are very easy to create and interpret. In almost any use case, it’s easy to see what they are about within seconds of the dashboard user glancing at them.

Choose the visualization type based on the data you’re presenting, but always bear in mind the end-user experience. Remember, it doesn’t matter if the data looks pretty if it is difficult to comprehend.

Tip 8: Tell a story (use the inverted pyramid)

There are many different types of dashboards out there, but the very best tell a story from start to finish. There is a principle from journalism called an inverted pyramid and it is easily applied in analytical dashboards too.

inverted pyramid principle in journalism, can be applied in dashboard design
Source

In short, the bottom of the inverted pyramid goes on top of your dashboard. This is the main goal of the dashboard - we can use the revenue example from the previous tips. Open up the dashboard with the goal and then proceed with the supporting metrics.

The middle portion of the pyramid is the second part of the dashboard. These are the supporting key performance indicators and key metrics (such as churn, conversion rates, and others) that explain why and how you reached your main goal.

The last part of the pyramid is the top. This is the least important information in the hierarchy but it is necessary to back up your story. These are metrics and datasets explaining the supporting metrics.

For example, an analysis of in-app product activation could explain an increase in churn (middle of the pyramid), which then reflects on revenue (bottom of the pyramid, top of the dashboard).

Or to make it even simpler, put your most relevant information first and then add less important information towards the bottom of the dashboard.

Tip 9: Round your numbers

If you work with large numbers, you may want to cut them short for better UX design and readability. For example, you have the choice of displaying the two different numbers:

24,524 or 24.5k

Depending on the business intelligence aspect of your dashboard, 24.5k could mean just as much as the first number. However, there is a huge difference in readability between the two. Most good dashboard software will have this functionality.

Last but not least, choose one number format and stick to it throughout your dashboard - which brings us to our next point.

Tip 10: Stay consistent with your design

If you use one set of colors and one type of visualization for a dataset, don’t switch it up and use something entirely different near the end of the dashboard. Choose a theme and stick with it, be it colors, types of widgets, the number formatting or something else.

To create an effective dashboard series, make sure that the design is consistent as time goes by. That means that a dashboard sent out 6 months from today should have the exact same design and layout with the newly updated metrics. When set up like this, the business dashboard is easier to read and understand for all stakeholders.

Wrapping up

Great dashboard UI design is crucial if you want to make sure your readers actually understand the data and use it for effective decision-making. But as you may be aware, creating great operational dashboards with a superb user interface is easier said than done.

Don’t worry though, as we can help. Luzmo specializes in in-app dashboards for your SaaS product and with our set of templates and easy-to-use dashboard editor, you can create your own dashboard in hours as opposed to weeks and months if you built it with a team of in-house developers.

Don’t want to take our word for it? Sign up for your free trial to check it out yourself.

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