5 Key Things to Remember When Designing Your Business Intelligence Dashboard

What is a BI dashboard?

A dashboard is a tool that helps visualize and analyze business data gathered from miscellaneous sources on one single screen to check the business performance instantly. It also helps in tracking KPIs and data of an organization for achieving its business goals.   

A good and effective BI dashboard should be personalized, logical, uncomplicated, and innate to get quick and clear information efficiently along with the latest trends and data analysis. An efficient BI dashboard helps in effective decision-making by visualizing complex metrics and data.  

The points which are very important and should be considered while designing your business intelligence dashboard are as under:

Which BI Dashboard?

The main types of dashboards are analytical, operational, tactical, and strategic. Usually, a BI dashboard is designed as per the requirement of the users and the nature of the business. Hence it is advised to create two different dashboards for different users.  

• Analytical BI dashboard: If you are looking for deep data analysis to know about the latest trends, predictions, and beneficial perceptions then it is the right tool for you.  
• Operational BI dashboard: If your requirement is to keep an eye on some particular business processes and execution of key performance indicators then this is the right selection.
• Tactical BI dashboard: If you wish to keep track of the business processes done by the middle-level management and highlight the data analysis then this is a perfect tool for you. This BI dashboard helps you to check the business performance for achieving business targets and also suggests an analytic approach to be taken for future business strategies.  
• Strategic BI dashboard: This BI dashboard is designed for the higher management, mostly C-level executives and managers to explore trendy business opportunities for better growth of the business. Strategic dashboards provide data less frequently than the operational dashboard. 

Business queries solution

Your business Intelligence Dashboard should answer your business-related queries. The business intelligence software solutions should be so designed that you may get all the general information related to data, business performance, metrics, and indicators instantly. While designing the BI dashboard, you should keep in mind how it would be useful in answering business questions. 

Bilateral Design

One of the most important features of dashboard design is its interactiveness. Two-way communication is very essential and powerful hence it should be considered while creating a dashboard. In the present scenario of technology, nobody takes interest in boring PowerPoint presentations and lengthy reports. The bilateral feature of the dashboards involves the users and helps them to know their business insights better. The users can customize these dashboards as per their requirements and can dive deep from the larger picture to the minute details of the business processes smoothly. 

Some of the salient features of an interactive dashboard are chart zoom, time interval widget, hide and show charts, click to filter for zooming, observing specific time scales on different charts, merging and analyzing miscellaneous data in just clicks, and scrutinizing the data respectively. 

User-Friendly Design

The critical feature of the dashboard design is simplicity over complexity. The simple and user-friendly design feature of the dashboard helps users to analyze and understand the complexity of data in a simple manner. While creating dashboard design it should be kept in mind that it should not be filled with clutter in the form of unuseful heavy data, graphics, and texts. After all, there should be some space for the user to breathe. Hence the design should be simple, efficient, compact, and effective. The various ways to minimize the clutter are by minimizing the use of colors, inserting white space uses, avoiding complex visualizations, avoiding ornamentation, and combining the related objects. 

Web Accessibility 

In the internet era, most of us remain online every time everywhere hence web presence and accessibility is the necessity of the day. Web-based BI dashboards are the demand of the day for business organizations. By using web-connected dashboards, you can connect with a huge number of people and share the related business data and vision with them for business collaboration smoothly.

Final Notes

Proper designing of BI Dashboards is a must. It should be user-friendly, efficient, effective, and powerful so that the user can visualize the relevant data clearly without any trouble.   

If designed properly, the BI dashboards provide complete business solutions that help organizations in making the right decisions. Its customized design plays an important role in the business growth of that organization.