Marcus Richards
When looking for a way to raise your sales or improve your business decisions, effective dashboards might be a helpful solution. Whether you focus on the end goal in your sales dashboards or fixate every step you make, this is a working tool to reach anything you have planned. Each effective dashboard has its own system. These simple tips will show you how to build your own dashboard.
Effective Dashboards: Major Tricks
You may use dashboards to improve your business projects or to create something from the very beginning. Before you do it, learn the basic principles. They are all simple and related to the strategy you have.
Learn the audience
Before doing anything, you require some brief but detailed investigation. You have to understand who your target audience is. Ask yourself these questions and write down the answers:
- Who will need the dashboard?
- Why might they need it?
- When will they use the dashboard?
- Where will they open the dashboard?
- What do they expect from the dashboard?
- Will it be their first dashboard?
Speak to the team and learn more about them to improve the dashboard. Each project is unique, so you will have to find specifications before you do anything. Don’t forget to write down the documents this team usually requires for work.
Message of dashboard
Every successful dashboard used in business must be informative for the end-users. Since the goals are different, dashboards have versatile summaries as well, whether it is an evaluation of the progress or revelation of the still uncovered areas. You can focus on future growth and areas where you can extend business.
No matter what your dashboard is dedicated to, you should focus on the business specifics. Think about the most significant information on the dashboard. Check out what the audience wants to see there. Don’t overload it with too much information close to the topic.
The best dashboard provides only helpful information that is easy to find. If your team can’t find everything they need in 10 seconds, you have to change your approach. Whenever you need to reveal numerous numbers, highlight the most important ones and make sure everything is visible.
Logical order of metrics
Locate everything you need on the dashboard in logical order. It does not have to be the standard alphabetical order. The key factor here is still your audience, so make sure that the dashboard contains the information useful for them in the order that looks natural for them as well. You can save lots of users’ time by providing visible data. Even if you have over 15 charts, try to limit their number on the dashboard.
If you can’t decide how to build your dashboard, here is a small trick. There must be 3 basic layers:
- The top layer contains the most important information. You can collect the most visible numbers there;
- The middle layer is about perspective trends that can be moved to the top layer someday;
- The lowest part belongs to the details. Provide all the details of the project the audience must get familiar with and keep in mind.
Simplicity in use
While every effective dashboard needs to be helpful and well-organized, you can’t forget about simplicity. Unfortunately, many business owners prefer to concentrate on all the data they can collect on the dashboard over its usability. To make the dashboard easy to use, you have to sign every chart and each number you write. Make the numbers more visible but don’t forget about the explanation. If the dashboard is overloaded with information, separate this data into several blocks and represent it on different dashboards.
Design dashboard wisely
If you want to hold the audience’s attention for more than 1 second, use bright colors in your dashboard. The main secret of its success is in the visuals that people tend to remember better than oral lectures. However, too many colors won’t be good as well. Make sure the colors you use do not hide any important information you’d like to display. If one color is brighter, don’t overuse it.
Rise Your Sales with Dashboard
There are no insignificant tools when it comes to improving your business. However, among multiple services on the market, you need to choose the most suitable one. An effective dashboard is a tool you need no matter what you want to do. Think about the best dashboard ideas and share them here, in the comments below.
