Before you start building your dashboard, you should be able to answer three questions:
- Who is this dashboard for?
- What is this dashboard trying to accomplish?
- How can I build this dashboard?
1. Who is this dashboard for?
- Does your audience already know what you’re talking about?
- Do you need to add more context to help make your point?
- Think about what context your audience will need and add this to your dashboard. For example, any acronyms that will need clarifying or if an increase in a number is a good or bad thing.
2. What is this dashboard trying to accomplish?
- Once your audience has seen the dashboard, do you want them to:
- take an action?
- know something they didn’t know before?
- What information do they need to take an action/be informed?
- Write out a clear summary of your dashboard’s purpose (and add it to your dashboard’s description!)
- Write an outline of the questions you want answered in your dashboard’s tiles. Start thinking about the story you’re trying to tell to your audience.
3. How can I build this dashboard?
- What data do I have?
- How can I use it to make my point?
- Match datasets to the outline of questions you made in the step above.
- Think about which metrics + dimensions you’ll use to make your points (and if these exist yet)