7 Top Tips for Better Business Dashboard Design Data Visualization | BI For Beginners

effective data visualization is essential for making your reports as easy to understand as possible in this video i'm going to be sharing with you the seven most important things to consider and implement when designing dashboards my top tips if you will let's dive straight in [Music] hello and welcome to vitamin bi bringing you business intelligence for beginners and beyond my name's adam and on this channel i talk about how you don't need to be a data scientist or have a huge budget to get started in bi so if that's something you're interested in learning more about don't forget to subscribe and click that bell to get notified when i post new videos so this video contains content taken from my brand new online course the ultimate guide to google data studio it's really about a lot more than just data studio though it covers lots of areas of business intelligence too so if it's something you're interested in then check out the link in the description okay so this is taken from module 8 all about building reports and dashboards if you've got any questions or comments just leave them in the comment section below and let's get on with the video [Music] number one plan ahead before you start adding charts to a report that you're planning on publishing make sure that you have a clear idea of its contents and layout what i recommend the first thing you do is to write down all of the queries or questions you want to ask of your data make a list it should contain the name of the query the data source it comes from if there's more than one the fields in the data needed and the visualization type the last one isn't essential at this point though if you haven't done any data discovery to see the kinds of results you'll be working with in the resources of this lesson i've added a template for this list of queries that you can download or share to your google drive it's what i share with my clients to help them plan out their project once you've made your list then i recommend taking a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and simply sketching out a rough drawing of how you'd like your report to look nothing detailed just a very rough sketch try and add in all of those queries from your list believe me this will be a great help you'll also find out whether you're going to need to have more than one page in your report how you could potentially group certain queries together which brings me on to my next tip tip number two tell a story what i mean by this is that your report is going to be read by its viewers most likely from top left to bottom right like a page of a book that's just the way our brains are set up so make sure there's some coherence to the report in terms of which queries you're showing where also think about grouping queries together that contain data relating to the same area or activity what you'll find with lots of reports that have multiple pages in them is that the first page will contain a kind of summary of the main headlines and the other pages will be dedicated to specific areas and go into more depth so this is what i mean by telling a story tip number three is closely related to the first two and that's to avoid tmi or too much information what i mean by this is to not overload your report with charts and information making it difficult to read and understand you should never be asking yourself can i squeeze another couple of charts onto the page just to avoid going over onto a new page because usually what happens in these cases is that you either end up reducing the size of other charts making less easy to read or you move charts around on the page to try and accommodate more charts which can mess with the story you're trying to tell or your charts will simply be too close together and your data needs room to breathe rather than overloading your viewer with information you could even do the opposite be more minimalist and use as many pages as you need to tmi also relates to individual visualizations for example don't have a bar chart with so many bars in it that it's hard to read and you can't see the labels properly there's a reason why data studio by default limits these charts to the top 10 values top tip number four ink to data ratio this is a concept introduced by edward tuft a data visualization expert in his 1983 book the visual display of quantitative data in it he says a large share of the ink on a graphic should present data information the ink changing as the data changes data inc is the non-erasable core of a graphic the non-redundant ink arranged in response to variation in the numbers represented so essentially what he's saying is that the majority of the ink needed to display or print a visualization should be data ink for example the bars on a bar chart or the line on a time series chart wherever possible you should remove anything non-essential to the visualization this means things like the grid on a chart axis labels etc if the visualization data can be read and understood without it then remove it a good example would be in a time series chart the values on the x-axis are dates and obvious to the viewer so you don't need to have an x-axis title label that says date because it's redundant an exception to this might be when you have more than one date in the data set and that needs specifying but you get the idea if you're interested in learning more about data visualization theory then i definitely would recommend you getting yourself a copy of the visualization of quantitative information i've put a link to it in the resources section of this lesson tip number five choosing the right visualization type we've looked at every single data studio visualization type and how to build queries for each one but it's important to make sure you're choosing the right visualization type for your query here are some questions you might want to ask are you comparing values then perhaps a column or bar chart would be best are you trying to visualize relationships or hierarchies then maybe a tree map are you showing percentages of a total a pie chart would probably be the best here unless you've got more than five values to display are you working with dates then a time series or area chart is the way to go all of these questions will help you decide which visualization type best suits what you're trying to convey the goal is to make your data as easy to understand for the viewer as possible and visualization type plays a big role in achieving this tip number six use colors wisely what i mean by this is don't go wild and start choosing different colors for each visualization keep your use of color as simple as possible you can use different colors to represent different areas in your report so everything relating to sales in one color marketing in another etc but only when it makes sense to do so i guess a rule would be that if you're going to use a different color make sure that it's applied to more than one visualization in the report however you will notice that the best designed reports and dashboards keep the color scheme very simple and remember also don't use very bright colors as this can be off-putting for the viewer and finally tip number seven design for your audience this relates to not only who is going to be viewing your report but also how it's going to be viewed or consumed on this first question who are they going to need to drill down into the data or filter it if they are you'll need to include these options when building your visualizations and designing your reports how familiar are your dashboard viewers with the data that's being presented this will determine how much description or non-essential information you have in visualizations to explain what is being presented how the report is going to be viewed and consumed will have an impact on things like the orientation and size of your report will it mainly be shared as a pdf that will be printed if so you'll need to make sure that it prints properly you would also in this case perhaps need to add more information like displaying certain values in charts because you can't hover over a chart with your mouse to display values on a pdf so you can see that there are many things to consider when it comes to your audience okay so there you have my top seven tips for better dashboard design you can perhaps now understand that it isn't just a question of throwing charts onto a page and why i think it needs to be studied independently from the other areas of connecting to data and building visualizations although this last area is somewhat closely related now let's get into how to build your reports in data studio and the interactivity options you can add for your viewers i'll see you in the next lesson so there you are those are my top seven tips for effective dashboard design if you found this content useful then please do like and subscribe as i said at the beginning of this video this content is taken from my brand new online course the ultimate guide to google data studio at the moment you can get 50 off as a pre-launch discount so check out the link in the description that's it from me for today until the next time stay vi curious

Channel: Adam Finer - Learn BI Online

Views: 51,766

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Id: nCrD5g8d3ow

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020