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We wrote The Big Book of Dashboards for anyone tasked with building or overseeing the development of business dashboards. Over the past decade, countless people have approached us after training sessions, seminars, or consultations, shown us their data, and asked: “What would be a really good way to show this?”

These people faced a specific business predicament (what we call a “scenario”) and wanted guidance on how to best address it with a dashboard. In reviewing dozens of books about data visualization, we were surprised that, while they contained wonderful examples showing why a line chart often works best for time-series data and why a bar chart is almost always better than a pie chart, none of them matched great dashboards with real-world business cases. After pooling our experience and enormous collection of dashboards, we decided to write our own book.

How This Book Is Different

This book is not about the fundamentals of data visualization. That has been done in depth by many amazing authors. We want to focus on proven, real-world examples and why they succeed.

However, if this is your first book about the topic of data visualization, we do provide a primer in Part I with everything you need to know to understand how the charts in the scenarios work. We also dearly hope it whets your appetite for more, which is why this section finishes with our recommended further reading.

How This Book Is Organized

The book is organized into three parts.

Part I: A Strong Foundation. This part covers the fundamentals of data visualization and provides our crash course on the foundational elements that give you the vocabulary you need to explore and understand the scenarios.

Part II: The Scenarios. This is the heart of the book, where we describe dozens of different business scenarios and then present a dashboard that “solves” the challenges presented in those scenarios.

Part III: Succeeding in the Real World. The chapters in this part address problems we've encountered and anticipate you may encounter as well. With these chapters – distilled from decades of real-world experience – we hope to make your journey quite a bit easier and a lot more enjoyable.

How to Use This Book

We encourage you to look through the book to find a scenario that most closely matches what you are tasked with visualizing. Although there might not be an exact match, our goal is to present enough scenarios that you can find something that will address your needs. The internal conversation in your head might go like this:

“Although my data isn't exactly the same as what's in this scenario, it's close enough, and this dashboard really does a great job of helping me and others see and understand that data. I think we should use this approach for our project as well.”

For each scenario we present the entire dashboard at the beginning of the chapter, then explore how individual components work and contribute to the whole.

By organizing the book based on these scenarios and offering practical and effective visualization examples, we hope to make The Big Book of Dashboards a trusted resource that you open when you need to build an effective business dashboard. To ensure you get the most out of these examples, we have included a visual glossary at the back of this book. If you come across an unfamiliar term, such as “sparkline,” you can look it up and see an illustration.

We also encourage you to spend time with all the scenarios and the proposed solutions as there may be some elements of a seemingly irrelevant scenario that may apply to your own needs.

For example, Chapter 11 shows a dashboard used by a team in the English Premier League to help players understand their performance. Your data might have nothing to do with sports, but the dashboard is a great example of showing current and historical performance. (See Figure I.1.) That might be something you have to do with your data. Plus, if you skip one scenario, you might miss a great example of the exact chart you need for your own solution.

Figure I.1 A player summary from an English Premier League Club

(Note: Fake data is used.)

We also encourage you to browse the book for motivation. Although a scenario may not be a perfect match, the thought process and chart choices may inspire you.

Succeeding in the Real World

In addition to the scenarios, an entire section of the book is devoted to addressing many practical and psychological factors you will encounter in your work. It's great to have theory- and evidenced-based research at your disposal, but what will you do when somebody asks you to make your dashboard “cooler” by adding packed bubbles and donut charts?

The three of us have a combined 30-plus years of hands-on experience helping people in hundreds of organizations build effective visualizations. We have fought (and sometimes lost) many “best practices” battles. But by having endured these struggles, we bring an uncommon empathy to the readers of this book.

We recognize that at times readers will be asked to create dashboards and charts that exemplify bad practice. For example, a client or a department head may stipulate using a particular combination of colors or demand a chart type that is against evidence-based data visualization best practices.

We hear you. We've been there.

Although the dashboard in Figure I.1 pertains to sports, the techniques are universal. Here the latest event is in yellow, the five most recent events are in red, and older events are in a muted gray. Brilliant.

We've faced many of the hurdles you will encounter and the concepts you will grapple with in your attempt to build dashboards that are informative, enlightening, and engaging. The essays in this section will help smooth the way for you by offering suggestions and alternatives for these issues.

What to Do and What Not to Do

Although the book is an attempt to celebrate good examples, we'll also show plenty of bad examples. We guarantee you will see this kind of work out in the wild, and you may even be asked to emulate it. We mark these “bad” examples with the cat icon shown in Figure I.2 so that you don't have to read the surrounding text to determine if the chart is something you should emulate or something you should avoid.

Figure I.2 If you see this icon, it means don't make a chart like this one.

Illustration by Eric Kim

What Is a Dashboard?

Ask 10 people who build business dashboards to define a dashboard and you will probably get 10 different definitions. For the purpose of this book, our definition is as follows:

A dashboard is a visual display of data used to monitor conditions and/or facilitate understanding.

This is a broad definition, and it means that we would consider all of the examples listed below to be dashboards:

● An interactive display that allows people to explore worker compensation claims by region, industry, and body part

● A PDF showing key measures that gets e-mailed to an executive every Monday morning

● A large wall-mounted screen that shows support center statistics in real time

● A mobile application that allows sales managers to review performance across different regions and compare year-to-date sales for the current year with the previous year

Even if you don't consider every example in this book a true dashboard, we think you will find the discussion and analysis around each of the scenarios helpful in building your solutions. Indeed, we can debate the definition until we are blue in the face, but that would be a horrible waste of effort as it simply isn't that important. What is important – make that essential– is understanding how to combine different elements (e.g., charts, text, legends, filters, etc.) into a cohesive and coordinated whole that allows people to see and understand their data.

Final Thought: There Are No Perfect Dashboards

You will not find any perfect dashboards in this book.

In our opinion, there is no such thing as a perfect dashboard. You will never find one perfect collection of charts that ideally suits every person who may encounter it. But, although they may not be perfect, the dashboards we showcase in the book successfully help people see and understand data in the real world.

The dashboards we chose all have this in common: Each one demonstrates some great ideas in a way that is relevant to the people who need to understand them. In short, they all serve the end users. Would we change some of the dashboards? Of course we would, and we weigh in on what we would change in the author commentary at the end of each scenario. Sometimes we think a chart choice isn't ideal; other times, the layout isn't quite right; and in some cases, the interactivity is clunky or difficult. What we recognize is that every set of eyes on a dashboard will judge the work differently, which is something you also should keep in mind. Where you see perfection, others might see room for improvement. The challenge all the dashboard designers in this book have faced is balancing a dashboard's presentation and objectives with time and efficiency. It's not an easy spot to hit, but with this book we hope to make it easier for you.

Steve Wexler

Jeffrey Shaffer

Andy Cotgreave