Digital Dashboards

Performance Dashboard Screenshot – A university research division scorecard based on excel

Posted on May 20, 2012 by digitaldashboards

The Division for Research at the University of Albany (SUNY) publishes this performance digital dashboard to show how they are doing in the areas of research development, grant/contract administration, awards, reporting, and post-award activities. This scorecard looks like it was generated by excel. Each thumbnail graph has a green/red, up/down arrow to show state and trend. I would note that the graphs can be grouped more clearly. They seem to be in vertical order but the groups go across columns. I would dedicated each column to one group and have the column heights jagged instead of being even across. What do you think?

Executive Dashboard

Homework: Study up on performance digital dashboards with the book, Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business. If you need to review graphing using excel, check out these books on excel charts .

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise digital dashboards. He could not find any executive digital dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business digital dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of digital dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.

A CIO and his Dashboard (and they lived happily ever after)

Posted on May 19, 2012 by digitaldashboards

Here is how things are supposed to work after you pour all that effort into your enterprise digital dashboard project. Screenshots from the product pdf at http://www.finisar.com/nt/netwisdom.php

Enterprise Dashboard Screenshot

Executive Dashboard Screenshot

Business Dashboard Screenshot

Digital Dashboard Screenshot

Excel 2007 Multi-color Data Bars

Posted on May 18, 2012 by digitaldashboards

Excel 12 (part of the upcoming Office 2007) will feature some very nice business intelligence tools including digital dashboarding functions. Check out this post describing the new “Data Bar” format http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2006/02/24/538875.aspx. The idea of a data bar is to have a background that is partially filled and is relative to the other values. As explained: “The Excel 2007 UI allows you to choose whatever colour you want for your data bars, but, by default, all the data bars you apply to a range have to be the same colour. Someone on our team recently showed me how to use a tiny bit of VBA to simulate having multiple colours of data bars on a range conditionally applied, so I thought I would pass along the trick.”

Default is one color:

Excel 12 Data Bars

The post describes how to get the much desired red/green/yellow effect:

Red/Green/Yellow Data Bar

So What or Who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of business digital dashboards. He could not find any executive digital dashboard design source books and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of digital dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.

Small Business Accounting Dashboard – Screenshot of MS Office SBA 2006

Posted on May 17, 2012 by digitaldashboards

Here's a screenshot from the Microsoft Office product – Small Business Accounting 2006. As described, "Small Business Accounting has a digital dashboard for viewing the overall status of the business. Reports for the digital dashboard include: alerts and reminders, cash-flow graph, vendors to pay, spotlights, overdue customer accounts list, and a bank account summary. The product also has five different "roles" that can be configured to control access to information throughout the system."

Note the Outlook feel to this business digital dashboard. It is indeed integrated with Outlook and can pull contact information right into the digital dashboard.

Digital Dashboard Screenshot

Web Metrics Enterprise Dashboard Screenshot – viewing real-time website statistics

Posted on May 16, 2012 by digitaldashboards

A Dashboard Spy over at simple-software.ca sent us this screenshot of an enterprise digital dashboard that tracks web metrics in real time. "It is a Java client application that allows you to view and interact with real-time web metrics sent from your web server. Collect data as visitors browse your site and view the data in the RTMon client application running on your desktop computer. In addition to traditional metrics, track individual page load times, per page CPU usage, memory usage and thread usage. Allows you to graphically view the data from traditional log files. RTMon shows individual data points, histograms, phase plots, and image plots for selected data."

Check out the download at this page.

Enterprise Dashboard

Helmet digital dashboard screenshots – a digital digital dashboard that can mean the difference between life and death

Posted on May 15, 2012 by digitaldashboards

Talk about a need for real time tracking on an executive digital dashboard! The next generation joint strike fighter, the F-35, will not have a Heads Up Display on the windshield but will have a special helmet-mounted digital dashboard that will sync to all onboard systems. Read about this real-lilfe, physical digital dashboard and see more screenshots at jsf.mil. PS. People ask me why I like to post so many physical items when this is a blog about digital digital dashboards. My background in design leads me to firmly believe that unless digital digital dashboard designs offer an acceptable "realness" that makes sense to the user, the product will feel unnatural and not be embraced . The best way to ground our digital designs is to study physical equivalents. You can bet that the effort going into this digital dashboard is for real – we're talking literally a life and death digital dashboard.

Enterprise Dashboard Screenshot

Executive Dashboard

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of business digital dashboards. He could not find any executive digital dashboard design source books and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of digital dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of an enterprise digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.

A Political Campaign Tracking Dashboard – Measuring the mud slinging with the Mud Meter

Posted on May 14, 2012 by digitaldashboards

The 2004 presidential campaign was remembered for its mudslinging. The smart folks at Arizona State University tracked the nastiness with its Campaign Tracking Dashboard. Here is a screenshot of this neat performance scorecard.

Political Campaign Dashboard Screenshot

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of business digital dashboards. He could not find any executive digital dashboard design source books and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of digital dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.

Enterprise Dashboards of the Future – a vision of a kitchen digital dashboard by GE

Posted on May 13, 2012 by digitaldashboards

Dashboard Spy readers – for a while now, we’ve been using our new url of http://dashboardspy.com to post our enterprise digital dashboard screenshots and articles. While most of you have updated your booksmarks and have joined us at the new site, some are still finding their way to this location.

Here is a peek at the types of posts that you may have missed. For a quick rundown of the digital dashboard screenshot posts, refer to this enterprise digital dashboard example sitemap. For a taste of the recent Dashboard Spy posts, I will now post today’s example digital dashboard here.

General Electric’s View of the Future Includes Dashboards – The Kitchen Dashboard

Those of you involved with enterprise digital dashboard design for your company have a responsibility to design not just for today’s needs, but also to anticipate future usage and build in enough forward-thinking design so that your corporate digital dashboard does not seem outdated next year. We all know how long updating corporate applications can take, so it really is in everyone’s best interest if you put on a futurist hat and really think about the future of digital dashboards, both at your company and in the world at large.

As food for thought, let’s visit with the futurists at GE. They have been hard at work envisioning the future kitchen. It seems that their idea is that the main interface to your kitchen in the year 2035 will be through a large, interactive kitchen digital dashboard. There is a slick video of the kitchen digital dashboard concept that you should all see. Here is a screenshot of the digital dashboard:

I think you will all agree that it is slick and sexy. However, my own opinion is that the entire concept (and this extends to the design of all digital dashboards) is over-engineered. How many of you have been on an enterprise digital dashboard project where the stakeholders get overly excited about various bells and whistles that they have seen and the digital dashboard becomes one big flashing mess? Well, my thoughts about this kitchen of the future take that warning in mind.

What I think is going on here is that some interface designers came up with a really cool concept that they like and applied it to a kitchen because they thought it futuristic. Did you notice that the main user of the digital dashboard in the video was a young man? No doubt, that reflects the design team that came up with this sci-fi vision (Yes, I’m going out on a limb here.)

If the GE design team had used a team of homemakers and cooking enthusiasts for the conceptualization, I think you’d have something much different. And I rather think that a complex digital dashboard where you drag portlets around the kitchen would not have been the answer.

So, according to the Dashboard Spy, the moral of this story is not to over-engineer the digital dashboard. Think of it this way, would your CEO want a digital dashboard with 40 panels and 300 KPIs? Or would he rather have a real business intelligence digital dashboard that consumes all the right metrics and shows his a few simple green or red lights?

What do you think? Come over to the new Dashboard Spy site and let us know.

Regards, The Dashboard Spy

Tags: Dashboard, Dashboards

References (Dashboard Sitemap Pages 1-4):

Dashboard

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Dashboard

Heat maps for stock market digital dashboards

Posted on May 12, 2012 by digitaldashboards

The concept of heat map graphics works very well for stock market digital dashboards. See this one in action when the nasdaq is open and go here for the underlying technology.

This is an animated gif:

Dashboard

This is a screenshot of the one on the exchange:

heatmap for digital dashboards

Sales Executive Dashboard Screenshots – configurable KPIs on user created digital dashboards

Posted on May 11, 2012 by digitaldashboards

Thanks to a Dashboard Spy at visualmining.com, we have these screenshots of user-created digital dashboards. As our source says, "Our digital dashboard allows the user to select one of "n" user-created pages, and then also gives them the ability to configure the KPI's individual attributes after the fact instead of having to edit the entire page. If you're interested in seeing it in action, you can "test drive" it via this Salesforce.com AppExchange link. Click the Test Drive button and then go into the Analytics tab when it comes up. Using the wizard and drag-and-drop interface, users select and configure the KPIs that they are most interested in. Once added to a page, the KPIs display current information, and continue to do so without any additional report writing, data downloading, or spreadsheet manipulations. It updates automatically! "

You'll see that the screens contain KPIs critical to measuring the sales process. The digital dashboard "provides accurate, on-demand answers to thousands of sales, marketing, and support questions such as:

• Did the marketing campaign meet its lead goals?
• Who sold the most units of the new product?
• Is the entire organization on track to meet its goals?
• How quickly are support cases being closed?

Sales Dashboards

Sales KPI Executive digital dashboard

Salesforce Enterprise Dashboard

Homework: Don't embark on a sales digital dashboard effort without a good background on measuring sales force performance. Start with these books on sales force management.

Digital Dashboards

Performance Dashboard Screenshot – A university research division scorecard based on excel

Recommended Reading

A CIO and his Dashboard (and they lived happily ever after)

Recommended Reading

Excel 2007 Multi-color Data Bars

Recommended Reading

Small Business Accounting Dashboard – Screenshot of MS Office SBA 2006

Recommended Reading

Web Metrics Enterprise Dashboard Screenshot – viewing real-time website statistics

Recommended Reading

Helmet digital dashboard screenshots – a digital digital dashboard that can mean the difference between life and death

Recommended Reading

A Political Campaign Tracking Dashboard – Measuring the mud slinging with the Mud Meter

Recommended Reading

Enterprise Dashboards of the Future – a vision of a kitchen digital dashboard by GE

Recommended Reading

Heat maps for stock market digital dashboards

Recommended Reading

Sales Executive Dashboard Screenshots – configurable KPIs on user created digital dashboards

Recommended Reading

Digital Dashboard Examples

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