4 Data instead of information

 

This chapter covers

  • Scoping dashboards for a specific purpose
  • Effectively organizing dashboards
  • Prompting the user with context

Sometimes you might have so much data in a system that you’re not really sure what’s going to be useful in a support type of situation. Instead of starting with a question of “What do I want to know?”, people start from the perspective of “What answers do I have?”

This leads to a few problems. First, you don’t challenge yourself to come up with ways to get the answers to the questions you have. And second, you tend to think of the data you have as the final answer or response. But data and information are two very different things.

Data is just raw unorganized facts, but when you take that data and give it context and structure, it becomes information. When you’re looking at your dashboards, you can quickly tell which dashboards are giving you data and which are giving you information.

4.1 Start with the user, not the data

Everyone presumes that just having the metrics about a system’s status is enough. But the way the status of a system is presented to users is as critical as having the metrics themselves. Poorly visualized metrics are useless, becoming nothing more than a sea of numbers in which the signal gets lost in the noise.

4.2 Widgets, the dashboard building blocks

4.2.1 The line graph

4.2.2 The bar graph

4.2.3 The gauge

4.3 Giving context to your widgets

4.3.1 Giving context through color

4.3.2 Giving context through threshold lines

4.3.3 Giving context through time comparisons

4.4 Organizing your dashboard

4.4.1 Working with dashboard rows

4.4.2 Leading the reader

4.5 Naming your dashboards

Summary