6 Tips For Giving Your Reporting Dashboards A Makeover via @sejournal, @amyppc

In their caller publication ‘Making Numbers Count,’ co-authors Chip Heath and Karla Starr explicate that our brains person not evolved to easy recognize ample numbers.

We truly lone person an instinct for tiny quantities – arsenic in, 5 and fewer.

Beyond that, it’s conscionable immoderate vague conception of “lots.”

But with 2.5 quintillion bytes of information being created each day, dealing lone with the numbers 0 to 5 successful our reporting is simply a luxury we don’t have.

Data visualizations service to alteration and comparison ample amounts of data, but astir reporting dashboards contiguous are inactive similar 1990s websites.

We enactment up with them, but they’re disfigured and awful, and we wouldn’t spot them with our recognition cards.

Non-strategic reports – dashboards that are excessively cluttered oregon excessively sparse to comprehend – marque it harder for your clients and stakeholders to recognize the information and instrumentality astute action.

Here’s however to crook those clunky dashboards into utile analysis.

1. Get Rid Of Charts That Have No Purpose

Not each illustration successful your dashboard deserves to beryllium there.

Unnecessary charts distract and vie for attraction with graphs that bash matter.

They tin besides derail meetings, encouraging your lawsuit to absorption connected minutia and earthy variance alternatively than the essential.

Not each information breakouts are useful. Some are conscionable useless, and immoderate are anti-useful.

Make each illustration gain its spot successful the dashboard by removing everything that doesn’t:

• Tie backmost to objectives.
• Provide context.
• Aid comprehension.

2. Get Rid Of “Unnecessary Ink”

Statistician and dataviz pioneer Edward Tufte explains,

“…clutter and disorder are failures of design, not attributes of information.”

Tufte introduced the “data-ink ratio,” which tells america to portion each decorative oregon other “ink” from charts until we’re near with lone the essential.

Improve your data-ink ratio by minimizing oregon removing:

• Any bevel oregon 3D effects.
• Gridlines.
• Redundant illustration legends.
• Chart borders and shadows.
• Background colour fills.

Tables are inherently busy, showing a batch of information each astatine once.

To marque your tables easier to read:

• Remove pagination and enactment numbers.
• Use compacted numbers (12M alternatively of 12,000,000).
• Remove truncation (“…”) by expanding the file width oregon wrapping text.
• Remove decimals (when numbers are >1).

  Image created by author, January 2022

When you present achromatic abstraction and destruct chartjunk, your reports archer a clearer story.

3. Fix Misleading Axes

Sometimes charts are truthful intentionally misleading that they extremity up making headlines.

More often, though, charts that mislead bash truthful unintentionally.

Here’s however to find and hole communal information visualization mistakes.

One communal mistake is utilizing a “truncated graph,” wherever the y-axis doesn’t commencement astatine 0.

Truncated graphs are truthful communal that Google Data Studio uses them by default successful immoderate of its illustration options.

The hole for this is easy.

Just acceptable immoderate “axis minimums” from car to zero.

While little common, charts tin sometimes person an inappropriate maximum.

This tin hap erstwhile you’ve hardcoded the max axis based connected a erstwhile information set, and you hide to update it erstwhile it’s utilizing a antithetic information range.

Also a precise casual fix.

Another contented is utilizing a “logarithmic scale” for your charts.

When you’ve tried to get a illustration to look a definite mode and thing other worked, you whitethorn person switched implicit to log standard for amended visualization.

Unless you’re genuinely moving with logarithmic information though, that’s not okay.

Change it backmost to linear.

4. Fix Poor Chart Selection

Chart enactment is not arsenic casual arsenic conscionable changing an axis. But it’s arguably much important, and easier to get wrong.

Have you ever tried to usage a chart enactment guide, lone to beryllium asked whether your information is nominal oregon categorical?

If you’re not fluent successful information visualization, past it tin consciousness easier to conscionable instrumentality with proceedings and mistake until you onshore connected thing that looks okay.

Marketer’s Crash Course In Chart Selection

This is not a implicit guide, but it covers a batch of dashboard mistakes:

• Use scorecards for your big KPIs, adjacent if the aforesaid information is successful tables and different graphs successful the report. It emphasizes what’s astir important.
• Use enactment charts to amusement trends implicit time. If your x-axis is thing different than a clip bid (continuous data), don’t usage a enactment chart.
• Only usage pie/donut charts to amusement the creation of a whole, ideally with 5 oregon less categories. Need to comparison pastry charts to each different to amusement a alteration successful composition? You astir apt request a antithetic illustration type. A stacked barroom illustration could beryllium a bully choice.
• Map charts are a bully mode to visualize information crossed regions, and clients look to similar them. Be definite that you’re not conscionable mapping colonisation information though, which is mostly not adjuvant successful making concern decisions.
• Bar charts enactment good to comparison class show for a azygous metric. Think income driven by (campaign, landing page, etc).

5. Add Contrast

Removing “unnecessary ink” from your charts puts you connected the close track.

This adjacent measurement is to furniture connected “necessary ink” that focuses your reader’s attraction and makes your illustration adjacent easier to interpret.

These 3 charts each usage an identical information set:

Chart A has nary absorption and feels “noisy.”

Charts B and C alteration enactment thickness and colour to gully your attraction to a azygous line.

Even though you don’t cognize the existent metrics oregon dimensions successful Charts B and C, you instantly cognize wherever to focus.

This is an illustration of utilizing “pre-attentive attributes,” which our brains process instantly connected a subconscious level.

When you privation to stress a cardinal point, you tin summation opposition with preattentive attributes like:

• Line (length, width, orientation).
• Color (hue, value, saturation).
• Grouping and position.

Don’t permission your assemblage asking “what americium I looking at?”

Help them retired with opposition and preattentive attributes.

6. Add Context

Context is different benignant of “necessary ink” that clarifies the meaning of your visualizations.

As a marketer and taxable substance expert, you cognize what your charts are about.

You tin survey each your dashboards and rapidly place trends and outliers.

For your clients and stakeholders, that’s astir apt not the case.

The radical connected the receiving extremity of your reports are apt not intimately acquainted with the acronyms and shorthand that’s evident to you.

They request much discourse successful the signifier of:

• Chart titles and descriptions.
• Acronyms that are spelled retired and defined.
• Annotations and microcopy.

Your assemblage besides needs a amended knowing of the factors driving the trends and information changes successful the report.

The metric is the “effect,” but what is the “cause”?

Look beyond the metrics themselves to find the narrative.

• What are the interior and outer forces that lend to performance?
• What backstory mightiness they beryllium missing (historical, seasonality, competition, purchaser preference)?
• Given existent and projected trends, what needs to hap next?

Finally, don’t presume that your assemblage knows the targets, adjacent if they were the ones who acceptable them.

Help them retired by comparing show to goals and not conscionable erstwhile clip periods.

Conclusion

‘Presentation Zen’ writer Garr Reynolds said,

“…you tin execute simplicity successful the plan of effectual charts, graphs and tables by remembering 3 cardinal principles: restrain, reduce, emphasize.”

Remove what is unnecessary, hole remaining problems, and adhd discourse and meaning to marque your charts and dashboards arsenic almighty arsenic possible.

More resources:

• 8 Tips to Make Your Data Visualization More Engaging & Effective
• 14 Essential Data Studio Visualizations for Paid Search Marketers 
• 10 Most Important PPC Trends To Know In 2022

Featured Image: Saklakova/Shutterstock