2018 Sunday Training

Information Dashboard Design

Nick Desbartas, Practical Reporting, Inc.

Many information dashboards fail to satisfy those who use them and are often under-utilized or abandoned after just a few months. This is a sad reality indeed since dashboards have the potential to significantly improve the effectiveness of users and save them a great deal of time.

Designed by Stephen Few, updated by Nick Desbarats, and based on the foundational book of the same name, Information Dashboard Design equips workshop participants with the fundamental principles and best practices that enable them to design information dashboards that:

• Can be reviewed by users quickly and without forcing them to click through filters and selectors that erode productivity and long-term dashboard traction
• Make problems and opportunities within the organization “pop” so that they get noticed

Enable users to see potentially causal relationships between metrics to help determine why a problem has occurred and how to respond to it

Key topics

• The definition of what a dashboard is (and isn’t), and what a dashboard should do as opposed what should be left to other types of information displays
• Effective dashboard organization and layout practices that enable rapid visual scanning, with examples of well-designed dashboards
• Compact information display techniques that enable large numbers of metrics to be shown on a single screen
• Graph types that work well on dashboards and those that don’t
• The importance of displaying contextual values such as targets, historical averages, and the like alongside current values to highlight metrics that require attention
• Steps in the dashboard design process
• 13 common dashboard design mistakes and how to avoid them

Topics not covered

• This is not a software product training course. The fundamental principles and best practices of good dashboard design apply when creating dashboards using any modern dashboard development technology.
• The emphasis is on creating highly functional information dashboards and not on creating visually impressive or highly interactive (but often less useful) information displays.

Workshop format

Workshops consists of engaging, interactive presentation segments that feature real-world dashboard examples and a group exercise wherein participants apply recently-learned skills by critiquing several real dashboards. Best practices are demonstrated, not just stated, so that participants understand not just what the best practices are but also why they yield dashboards that are genuinely more useful and that deliver more value to organizations. No computers or software are used. Workshops last one full day with morning, lunch and afternoon breaks. At the end of the workshop, each participant receives a copy of Stephen Few’s book, Information Dashboard Design: Displaying data for at-a-glance monitoring, on which the workshop is based.

About Nick Desbarats

For over 20 years, Nick Desbarats has been designing information displays that enable senior decision-makers to make better, more data-driven decisions based on potentially large amounts of data, and to do so in less time and with less effort. He has extensive knowledge of data visualization, dashboard design, cognition and cognitive biases, perception, memory and learning, software design and development, and product management.

As an independent data visualization educator and consultant, Nick has taught data visualization and information dashboard design to over 1,000 professionals in ten countries at organizations such as NASA, Bloomberg, The Central Bank of Tanzania, Northwestern Mutual, The United Nations, Marathon Oil and Teradata, among others. In 2014, Nick became the first and only educator to be authorized by Stephen Few to deliver his foundational data visualization and dashboard design workshops, and he’s a contributor to Steve’s widely read Perceptual Edge blog. Nick also frequently consults for large and mid-sized private, public and non-profit organizations, designing custom information dashboards for senior decision-makers and other roles. Nick’s first book, Beyond Dashboards, will be published in late 2018.

Nick has held senior management positions at three software companies and was a cofounder of BitFlash Inc., which raised over $20M in venture financing and was sold to OpenText Corporation in 2004. In 2012, Nick was granted a United States patent in the decision-support field.