BI Dashboard Design Principles & Best Practices

Business Intelligence is used for gathering data from multiple sources to present it in a way that enhances business decisions.

Business intelligence helps you get the correct data to help you make the correct decision for your company.


Benefits of business intelligence are:

– Opportunity to save costs.

– Reduce maintenance and usage costs due to multiple.

– Reduce costs (losses) associated with decisions.

– Make your entire organization more efficient with reporting systems and by removing silos of information based on inaccurate information.

– Be able to stand out in the market at today’s pace and stay ahead of the competition with the use of the right business intelligence tools

– Provide dynamic and interactive reporting

– Reports create simplicity and reduce Business Technology. 

– Cost savings by reducing the business users’ effort to create these reports and validate your data.


Business Intelligence Dashboards:

To analyze data effectively, data visualization and information management solutions are needed which are based on business intelligence dashboards. Graphs, charts, reports, filters, and actions are all used by content creators to view data in snapshots and get overviews, thereby providing understandable data analysis in a customized format.

Using cloud-based technology Business Intelligence dashboards can be updated in real-time. Business Intelligence dashboards allow the user to engage with the information and analyze it to the best of their ability.

Business Intelligence dashboards help companies by making a huge volume of data easily understandable and approachable for non-technical employees. Non-technical users can interact with data using self-service business intelligence.


Business Intelligence Dashboard Design Principles:

1. Make it easy to understand:

Complex dashboards will only make it harder for the users to access and understand the data which completely defies the purse of Business Intelligence Dashboards because the users will waste a lot of time on data analysis using the complex dashboards.

2. Make it neat and spacious:

Don’t try to place all the information on one single page.

3. Choose the correct KPIs

Your KPIs will help in directing the users. Make sure you select the most optimal KPIs to feature in your dashboard.

4. Context and direction are mandatory:

The information being presented by the Business Intelligence Dashboard should be relevant to their objectives , else the viewers may view a dashboard as a menace instead of a valuable tool.


Business Intelligence Dashboard Design best practices:

* Avoid clutter. Less is more! Don’t add a lot of content on a single page.

* Design for the target audience – create customized and specific dashboards only. 

* Drive actionable insights. Visualization should display information that helps stakeholders make decisions.

* Provide context. Make sure that data includes essential information like dates or year-over-year comparisons to understand trends.

Review the dashboard carefully and make sure you’ve made it in an optimal way.

Creating Business Intelligence dashboard designs can be a complicated process but it can all be a piece of cake if you use Business Intelligence dashboard software tools which are basically dashboard builders.

Here are some things you should keep in mind while opting for a business intelligence dashboard software or a dashboard reporting software:  Select a business intelligence dashboard software that lets you prompt application loading time, let viewers filter data, ensure proper formatting and eliminate redundancy.

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Sreeram Sreenivasan is the Founder of Ubiq. He has helped many Fortune 500 companies in the areas of BI & software development.