User Experience Guidelines for shared dashboards (less is more)

Dashboards are cool.

In offices everywhere, the "mission control" style displays made famous by NASA are being thrown up right and left as are cool graphics of KPI's for running the business.

There are different sorts of dashboard displays that have dramatically different UX requirements. There is often no serious user advocate for the UX portion of the project and typically, the prototyping environment for public displays doesn't use the actual display but just a computer screen. This post is intended to help you discuss these issues with your users.

Gather User Experience Requirements

If the functional requirements are a 37" hallway mounted flat panel displaying three pages, each with 16 KPIs, you have a problem. You need to evaluate the delivery format at the front-end to guide the amount and size of the widgets before the users overload on "must have" stats.

Length of View - How long does the user see/use the dashboard in a single sitting?
Frequency of View - How often does the user see/visit the dashboard?
Age of User - What % of the user base commonly wears reading glasses?
Diversity - Is there a wide or narrow range of user types? Are their needs homogenous, heterogeneous, or harmonious?
Ambient Light - What are typical lighting conditions for the viewer?

Black and White

When the display is the light source - a flat panel rather than a printed sign - white text on black background beats black on white by a wide margin. Use upper and lower case - it improves legibility. On the desktop where the output may be mixed with other content, you can invert back, but there really is no need. If it's a full screen display, white on black is best.

Bigger is Better, Less is More

Yes, this one conflicts with advice below but I love this dashboard. 9 key facts with icons reminding you what they are about, split into three pages. If you can't fit the info on with big enough text, then add page flips or monitors. For common areas with brief viewing, look at text at least 1"-2" high @ 20' away. For desktop, keep key indicators at 24-30 pt text.

Don't personalize unless it's absolutely necessary

If the performance indicators are "Key" then establishing a view of the most important ones, common to an entire team, has real value. Personalized dashboards have been the rage for quite a while but they don't deliver the impact of a key set of consistent measures. Particulary for casual viewers, it's very important to maintain constancy. This particular operational wallboard is implemented in Geckoboard - a nice wallboard tool for rapid prototyping or low-cost deployment.

KPI dashboards vs. Analytics/Discovery

The front page of a nice analytics drill-down tool looks identical to a KPI dashboard. They are often deployed together. Take a look at your actual usage numbers however - many projects I've been involved with have orders of magnitude drop off at each tier of personalization/discovery - 1000 viewers, 100 people who drill down, 10 who customize queries and 1 who does personalized layouts. Analysts need good tools but most KPI users are not analysts (or they become bad analysts....)

Buy something tested - or test, test, test

You don't know what you don't know, nor do your users. Having a broad base of dashboard testers is extremely important to deployment success. The easiest way to do this is simply buy something already popular in your industry. It's very possible, in fact likely, that your unique requirements may not actually be that unique. Mostly though, it's very hard on budget and schedule to do proper testing, even F100 dashboard projects, so simple things get screwed up.

Do you need to look really cool? Probably Not.

Lucid Design Group makes this very cool looking dashboard kits for getting large communities on board with saving energy. No one needs to use their dashboard - they need it to be attractive in the 1st second and 1st 10 seconds of use to invite usage. Contrast that with a stock ticker. Even the extremely cool NASDAQ Times Square ticker board has a more functional design. Think bauhause/road signs, not Web 2.0...