What is a dashboard? A complete overview

In this day and age, understanding data is the key to making the best decisions for any business. However, the amount of information that’s available at any time can be overwhelming for the most data-savvy person.

So what’s the key to making data-driven decisions? Finding the most important data and formatting it in a way that’s easy to understand. This can change, depending on who will view the data. If you’re an industry expert, you may find complex data easier to understand. If you’re presenting data to less well-versed stakeholders at your company, you may need to simplify it before sharing it with others.

One of the easiest ways to make data easy to understand for technical and non-technical audiences is to create a dashboard that easily displays all of your data visualizations in one place.

In this article, we will run through:

• Dashboard definition
• How dashboards work
• Uses
• Importance
• How to create a dashboard
• Types of dashboards
• Best practices
• Benefits

Data dashboards versus reports

Both dashboards and reports are commonly utilized to collect and analyze data. So what makes them different?

Broadly speaking, reports usually have a more narrow focus. They serve the purpose of providing a deep-dive view into a data set and tend to concentrate on a single item or event.

On the other hand, dashboards tend to have a high-level view of broad amounts of data and are created to answer a single question. That question can be broad, such as, “how was our site performance last month?” Or more specific, such as, “how many units did we sell?” Or perhaps something that’s a little harder to track without specialized expertise, such as, “is our overall efficiency improving?”

Data dashboards versus data visualizations

Two common terms when it comes to analytics and reporting are “data dashboard” and “data visualization.” What’s the difference?

Data visualization is a way of presenting data in a visual form to make it easier to understand and analyze.

Data dashboards are a summary of different, but related data sets, presented in a way that makes the related information easier to understand. Dashboards are a type of data visualization, and often use common visualization tools such as graphs, charts, and tables.

How do dashboards work?

Dashboards take data from different sources and aggregate it so non-technical people can more easily read and interpret it. With interactive elements, it helps anyone using the dashboard better understand certain points, explore areas of increased interest, and support more questioning to arrive at key insights or make key decisions.

Dashboard uses

The main use of a dashboard is to show a comprehensive overview of data from different sources. Dashboards are useful for monitoring, measuring, and analyzing relevant data in key areas. They take raw data from many sources and clearly present it in a way that’s highly tailored to the viewer’s needs—whether you’re a business leader, line of business analyst, sales representative, marketer, and more.

Use dashboards to measure things like:

• Customer metrics
• Financial information
• Sales information
• Web analytics
• Manufacturing information
• Human resources data
• Marketing performance
• Marketing performance
• Marketing performance
• Logistics information

Since dashboards are useful aggregation and visualization tools, they’re highly versatile—used by professionals to analyze complex data or subject matter experts to track or present data to non-subject matter experts. Use them in your presentations to executives or other key stakeholders to help them understand challenges, opportunities, where to grow and make changes.

The importance of dashboards

Dashboards are important because they provide a platform for people to make better, more informed, data-driven decisions. Since they’re dynamic, interactive, and show near real-time data, they help you get a more precise, in-the-moment understanding of what’s happening in the world around you and navigate rapid, sometimes difficult changes.

How to create a data dashboard

There are many different solutions to help you build dashboards: Power BI, Excel, or Google Sheets. But at a basic level, here are important steps to help you build a dashboard:

1. Define your audience and goals:

   • Ask who you are building this dashboard for and what do they need to understand? Once you know that, you can answer their questions more easily with selected visualizations and data.

2. Choose your data:

   • Most aubusinesses have an abundance of data from different sources. Choose only what’s relevant to your audience and goal to avoid overwhelming your audience with information.

3. Double-check your data:

   • Always make sure your data is clean and correct before building a dashboard. The last thing you want is to realize in several months that your data was wrong the entire time.

4. Choose your visualizations:

   • There are many different types of visualizations to use, such as charts, graphs, maps, etc. Choose the best one to represent your data. For example, bar and pie charts can quickly become overwhelming when they include too much information.

5. Use a template:

   • When building a dashboard for the first time, use a template or intuitive software to save time and headaches. Carefully choose the best one for your project and don’t try to shoehorn data into a template that doesn’t work.

6. Keep it simple:

   • Use similar colors and styles so your dashboard doesn’t become cluttered and overwhelming.

7. Iterate and improve:

   • Once your dashboard is in a good place, ask for feedback from a specific person in your core audience. Find out if it makes sense to them and answers their questions. Take that feedback to heart and make improvements for better adoption and understanding.