We recently embarked upon a journey of creating some functionally complex but easy to use dashboards. These dashboards are built for a specific user community with only one goal in mind FAST , FOCUSED and EASY.
Wanted to share some outcomes focused on a sales dashboards focused on executive audience with a focus towards design approaches to benefit some of the community members with similar use cases.
As executives are very familiar with looking for something like a executive briefing with all the most relevant numbers in one place and also some explanation about what is happening from an Financial Analyst. We created an dashboard with all the relevant sales matrices and also enabled financial analyst to enter their input about the numbers. For this purpose we have to built custom web services which allows us to write data back to the database and only select analyst will be able to input comments to be displayed to the executives.Also this dashboard is built with a principle that if executives want they can print out the dashboard and take it with them. Here is how it looks like.
In this dashboard it shows all the sales related matrices and shows an map as the focal points showing how the sales are across the globe.It also shows an edit button when a person opens the dashboard who have access to edit comments.
Now once the Executive Sales summary is complete the next steps are to show exactly how the numbers add up in much more details. For this purpose we build another dashboard which adds additional details to the executive summary. Here are some of the UI patterns that we used for the details sales dashboard. The focus of these dashboard as you can see is to not dilute attention and focus on a single chart per page when possible which does justice to the charts and shows the trends much more clearly.
I will also attach some design templates with the post which can be used to understand the design patterns more clearly.