Conversion Thursday and dashboards
March’s Conversion Thursday covered a great subject, how to design a great dashboard. Pere Rovira and Daniel Rodriguez prepared some great slides and there was a fair amount of attendees.
What I missed the most? Dialogue, conversation, questions…
Is great to hear it from the experts but is even better if the conversation covers a wider range of experiences, overall that’s one area the CT’s have failed to convey.
You can take a look at the slides here.
Two other things I missed yesterday were:
- Clear examples of data visualizations misuses. How many times I have seen a pie chart where bars were the right choice or the abuse of stacked bars or areas when there is a need to compare the evolution of each series along with the total and not only the contribution of each part.
- A visual example of data-ink ratio. This concept is truly great and although Dani warned us about Excel and other software that on the first iteration does nothing for the data-ink ratio figure, I think a clear visual example could have delivered the message even better.
Below you can see an example on how data-ink ratio is improved. Going from the lowest data-ink ration on the upper-left corner to the highest in the lower-right.
I hope everyone can apply some of the concepts presented to improve or to create their perfect dashboard.