“Dashboards have become popular in recent years as uniquely powerful tools for communicating important information at a glance. Although dashboards are potentially powerful, this potential is rarely realized,” says principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge Steven Few.
“The greatest display technology in the world won’t solve this if you fail to use effective visual design. And if a dashboard fails to tell you precisely what you need to know in an instant, you’ll never use it, even if it’s filled with cute gauges, meters, and traffic lights. Don’t let your investment in dashboard technology go to waste.”
Therefore, instead of presenting a vertical “freight train” of graphs and content at your next board meeting, craft a “virtual display of the most important information needed to achieve your objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.”
Dashboard from Stephen Few that combines several bullet graphs along with Edward Tufte’s sparklines to convey a great deal of information in a small amount of space.
Surprise (& wow) your colleagues at your next meeting by using Plotly dashboards and presentations.
In this post, we show off 3 separate dashboards, influenced by Dribbble, FiveThirtyEight, and NTHSA.
1. Dribbble
This dashboard allows you to instantaneously take your organization’s pulse.
Using Plotly’s Streaming API, you can set your sales data up to update automatically following each transaction. Use a heatmap to track each member of your sales team’s performance and the “slice” (pie chart) to monitor what types of sales your team is making.
Dashboard
Presentation
2. FiveThirtyEight
This FiveThirtyEight dashboard is a great example of how you can spice up your blog posts using Plotly’s dashboards. Since our dashboards are 100% customizable, you can match your company’s theme very easily.
Furthermore, your content is:
1. In One Place: It is reported that web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. That should be incentive enough to produce a compact article and reduce the scrolling that is necessary. Plotly embeddable dashboards & presentations can help you accomplish this!
2. Social Media Gold: Set your data into action and make an animated GIF of your dashboard for Twitter.
3. Downright Stylish: Plotly graphs and dashboards use D3.js, the gold standard of interactive web graphics.
Dashboard
Presentation
3. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
Our final example showcases National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data in both a dashboard and presentation. The dashboard “tells you precisely what you need to know in an instant,” following Few’s advice to a t: U.S. road fatalities are decreasing. The dashboard spectacularly accomplishes its goal of being a “virtual display of the most important information.”
Dashboard
Presentation
If you liked this post, please consider sharing. If you’d like to learn how to make these graphs, visit our website or check out our tutorials. We have tutorials that show you how to make and embed graphs in your website, blog, or apps. To learn more about how companies are using Plotly Enterprise across different industries, see our customer stories.