What Makes For a Good Dashboard?

Admit it, the majority of the dashboards suck.

Even the ones you and I create aren’t always engaging enough to get the desired results, and everyone either fails or struggles with it.

For the past few months, I have refined a “formula” to deliver key information to the reader and guarantee results from my dashboards.

To do this, I have based my dashboards on C.A.P, an acronym I use to ensure my dashboards are captivating by answering the following questions:

C - Context

What information does the dashboard need to communicate?

What background details are relevant in the creation of the dashboard?

To demonstrate, I am going to use the Airbnb business in New York as an example.

The context of this dashboard is to communicate the overall Airbnb rental business in New York.

Some needed background details include the types of rooms, approximate nights booked, neighborhoods in New York, etc.

Answering both of these questions will give you an overall view of the main point in the dashboard and keep all information relevant to the topic at hand.

A - Audience

Who is the intended audience of the dashboard?

An executive? A manager? An Analyst?

Any audience member can be organized into these 3 roles depending on what they are looking for:

Executive - A strategic dashboard to track KPIs.

Manager - An operational dashboard to keep them informed on daily activities

Analyst - An analytical dashboard to process data to identify various trends

In this case, the audience would be a real estate investor.

Therefore, a strategic dashboard to show KPIs for choosing a potential neighborhood is appropriate.

P - Purpose

What business questions does the dashboard need to answer?

How important is each question and problem?

What information do we need to answer the problems?

Dashboards will help the investor be more decisive in answering these problems:

• Which neighborhood to search?

• What types of properties to consider?

• How competitive is the Airbnb rental business in New York?

What Can We Do With This?

By implementing the C.A.P. method, you can easily discern major business insights and learn (in this case) the best ways to increase revenue with real estate investments.

Most of the time, you and I spend most of our time learning data visualization tools such as Power BI, Tableau, etc.

Which comes back to bite when we make dashboards and miss critical details about the context, audience, and purpose.

Tweet of the Week

This week’s tweet is a Fundamental concept of types of Data Analytics. But there’s a twist.

We are categorizing Analytics based on 5 types of questions it can answer.