As part of the dashboarding series of webinars for Tableau, I presented “Design Tricks for Great Dashboards“. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know your thoughts below or on twitter (@acotgreave)
Here is the list of resources and ideas I mentioned in the talk.
Books
The books I used for inspiration are:
- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
- Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
- The Big Book of Dashboards by myself, Steve Wexler and Jeff Shaffer
Further reading on the design principles
- Don Norman’s Three Levels of Processing. A summary of the visceral, behavioural, and reflective processing levels. This article by Don Norman explores the issue in more detail.
- Affordances and signifiers. Don Norman, of course, has excellent resources on this aspect of design. I’ve written previously on how this applies to dashboards.
- Form versus Function. The Wikipedia article is a great starting point with many useful links. This article on Simplicable explains it in more detail. More recently, the New York Times explains its demise.
- Framing. The original paper from Kahneman and Tversky is here. This article from Psychology Today provides some excellent examples.
- The Gutenberg Diagram. This is attributed to Edmund Arnold. A good summary is found here, an article which also references the eye-tracking work of Norman/Neilsen. You can find out more about Tableau’s eye-tracking research here.
- Uniform Connectedness. This article from the Interaction Design Foundation explains the principles defined by Palmer, and more, very well.
- Hick’s Law. Wikipedia is a friend again here, as it the Interaction Design Foundation with another great backgrounder for designers.
Dashboards and visualizations
Mike Cisneros’ Oil v Gold masterpiece
Subscriber Churn from Big Book of Dashboards
Jacob Olsufka’s Energy in America dashboard
Elena Hristozova’s National Student Survey analysis
Accenture’s RBS 6 Nations score trackers
Michael “Framing Master” Mixon
Transportation Reports by David Krupp
2 Comments
Add Yours →Dear Mr. Cotgreave,
Thank you for the great webinar on 11/7/17. Could you please add the link to CTT Wireless dashboard as well? I think I liked it best out of all the dashboards presented in this session.
Hi Helen, the original version of the CTT dashboard is by Dundas. You can find a blog about it here:
http://www.dundas.com/learning/white-papers/26-10-2012-the-rise-of-dashboards-in-the-telecommunications-industry