The following is a set of design principles to ensure your dashboard is usable, used and importantly, looks great. This section is highly relevant to anyone looking to better connect their audience to their data through stunning data visualizations that communicate effectively.

The main purpose of a dashboard is to communicate data in a visual form that highlights to the reader what’s important, arranges it for clarity and leads them through a sequence that tells the story best. Design exists to assist this purpose. From this end users can make decisions and take action – be ‘data-led’ Unfortunately the best thinking and planning can come undone by poor design execution where bad design decisions put users under increased cognitive load and render the dashboard unusable.

Dashboards are already often communicating quite complex scenarios. There is a lot for the user to take onboard – multiple visualizations, metrics, dimensions, scales, descriptions and colors. It is therefore critical that the dashboard designer do what they can to both guide and simplify the experience for the end-user to make it as easy as possible to interpret what they are being presented with. Put simply, they should not let design complicate the experience and get in the way but be a vehicle by which the dashboard story is best communicated.

In summary, you can increase the adoption of your dashboards by end-users by incorporating common design and usability principles including;