Graphical Representations: Dashboards (Just the Quotes)

"The real value of dashboard products lies in their ability to replace hunt‐and‐peck data‐gathering techniques with a tireless, adaptable, information‐flow mechanism. Dashboards transform data repositories into consumable information." (Gregory L Hovis, "Stop Searching for InformationMonitor it with Dashboard Technology," DM Direct, 2002)

"Dashboards and visualization are cognitive tools that improve your 'span of control' over a lot of business data. These tools help people visually identify trends, patterns and anomalies, reason about what they see and help guide them toward effective decisions. As such, these tools need to leverage people's visual capabilities. With the prevalence of scorecards, dashboards and other visualization tools now widely available for business users to review their data, the issue of visual information design is more important than ever." (Richard Brath & Michael Peters, "Dashboard Design: Why Design is Important," DM Direct, 2004)

“Dashboards aren't all that different from some of the other means of presenting information, but when properly designed the single-screen display of integrated and finely tuned data can deliver insight in an especially powerful way.” (Richard Brath & Michael Peters, "Dashboard Design: Why Design is Important," DM Direct, 2004)

"An effective dashboard is the product not of cute gauges, meters, and traffic lights, but rather of informed design: more science than art, more simplicity than dazzle. It is, above all else, about communication." (Stephen Few, "Information Dashboard Design", 2006)

"Most dashboards fail to communicate efficiently and effectively, not because of inadequate technology (at least not primarily), but because of poorly designed implementations. No matter how great the technology, a dashboard's success as a medium of communication is a product of design, a result of a display that speaks clearly and immediately. Dashboards can tap into the tremendous power of visual perception to communicate, but only if those who implement them understand visual perception and apply that understanding through design principles and practices that are aligned with the way people see and think." (Stephen Few, "Information Dashboard Design", 2006) 

"Having a purposeless or poorly performing dashboard is more common than not. This happens when the underlying architecture is not designed properly to support the needs of dashboard interaction. There is an obvious disconnect between the design of the data warehouse and the design of the dashboards. The people who design the data warehouse do not know what the dashboard will do; and the people who design the dashboards do not know how the data warehouse was designed, resulting in a lack of cohesion between the two. A similar disconnect can also exist between the dashboard designer and the business analyst, resulting in a dashboard that may look beautiful and dazzling but brings very little business value." (Nils H Rasmussen et al, "Business Dashboards: A visual catalog for design and deployment", 2009)

"In general, it still holds true that 'there is no such thing as a free lunch'. What this means is that the most advanced dashboard solutions with the most features and fl exibility are generally also the technologies that require more setup and more skill sets from the administrators and the end users. In some cases companies 'dumb down' their dashboard application in the initial stages of deployment so as not to scare their users with too many options. Later, when a dashboard culture has developed, they open up more of the functionality." (Nils H Rasmussen et al, "Business Dashboards: A visual catalog for design and deployment", 2009)

"There are myriad questions that we can ask from data today. As such, it’s impossible to write enough reports or design a functioning dashboard that takes into account every conceivable contingency and answers every possible question." (Phil Simon, "The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the Quest for Better Decisions", 2014)

"A dashboard is like the executive summary of a report. We read executive summaries and skip the body of the report if the summary is more or less in line with our expectations. Trouble is, measurement is never exhaustive. It is only when we dive in that we realize what areas may have been missed." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"[…] an overall green status indicator doesn’t mean anything most of the time. All it says is that the things under measurement seem okay. But there always will be many more things not under measurement. To celebrate green indicators is to ignore the unknowns. […] The tendency to roll up metrics into dashboards promotes ignorance of the real situation on the ground. We forget that we only see what is under measurement. We only act when something is not green." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"Rolling up fine-grained metrics to create high-level dashboards puts pressure on teams to keep the fine-grained metrics green even when it might not be the best use of their time." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)

"A performance dashboard is a practical tool to improve management effectiveness and efficiency, not just a pretty retrospective picture in an annual report." (Pearl Zhu, "Performance Master: Take a Holistic Approach to Unlock Digital Performance", 2017)

"All human storytellers bring their subjectivity to their narratives. All have bias, and possibly error. Acknowledging and defusing that bias is a vital part of successfully using data stories. By debating a data story collaboratively and subjecting it to critical thinking, organizations can get much higher levels of engagement with data and analytics and impact their decision making much more than with reports and dashboards alone." (James Richardson, 2017)

"Dashboards are a type of multiform visualization used to summarize and monitor data. These are most useful when proxies have been well validated and the task is well understood. This design pattern brings a number of carefully selected attributes together for fast, and often continuous, monitoring - dashboards are often linked to updating data streams. While many allow interactivity for further investigation, they typically do not depend on it. Dashboards are often used for presenting and monitoring data and are typically designed for at-a-glance analysis rather than deep exploration and analysis." (Danyel Fisher & Miriah Meyer, "Making Data Visual", 2018)

"Infographics combine art and science to produce something that is not unlike a dashboard. The main difference from a dashboard is the subjective data and the narrative or story, which enhances the data-driven visual and engages the audience quickly through highlighting the required context." (Travis Murphy, "Infographics Powered by SAS®: Data Visualization Techniques for Business Reporting", 2018)

"Dashboards are collections of several linked visualizations all in one place. The idea is very popular as part of business intelligence: having current data on activity summarized and presented all inone place. One danger of cramming a lot of disparate information into one place is that you will quickly hit information overload. Interactivity and small multiples are definitely worth considering as ways of simplifying the information a reader has to digest in a dashboard. As with so many other visualizations, layering the detail for different readers is valuable." (Robert Grant, "Data Visualization: Charts, Maps and Interactive Graphics", 2019)

"Understanding the entire data ecosystem, from the production of a data point to its consumption in a dashboard or a visualization, provides the ability to invoke action, which is more valuable than the mere sum of its parts." (Jesús Barrasa et al, "Knowledge Graphs: Data in Context for Responsive Businesses", 2021)