Design Data Visualizations & Dashboards For Insight & Action

Turn complex data into digestible visuals and dashboards that reveal actionable insights. Explore the five-step dashboard design method and compare reports with dashboards through real-world examples.

Explore why data visualizations and dashboards fail by examining audience mismatch, information mismatch, and tech-driven approaches. Learn to design with user needs and an iterative, five-step process before building.

Explore the landscape of business intelligence tools and dashboards, with a focus on design over technical builds. Tools enable data access and drill-down, but design comes first.

Understand user needs and kpis, prioritize metrics, brainstorm layout ideas, prototype designs, and gather user feedback to iterate before building dashboards using the five-step method.

Identify user roles and their needs as the first step in the five-step dashboard design method, guiding how users view and act on data.

Explore why dashboards exist for sales team managers, identify key KPIs and heat maps, and analyze tasks, goals, and current reporting methods to design context-aware visualizations.

Identify, collect, and prioritize metrics and key performance indicators for dashboards, using an Excel tool to document data and display sections, definitions, views, alerts, and owners across user roles.

Shortlist KPIs from metrics to fit your audience, choosing exploratory dashboards for discovery or explanatory dashboards for storytelling, with prioritized KPIs, thresholds, and time-based comparisons.

Move into ideation at step three of the dashboard design method, shaping the story with KPIs, contextual data, and patterns of how people see on a single-screen, glanceable dashboard.

Explore a brainstorm phase of step three and five in dashboard design, translating collected data into ideas with stakeholders, KPI prioritization, and visual concepts like bar, line, or pie charts.

Explore storyboarding during ideation to craft dashboards that tell a clear story with KPIs and context, using sketches and simple tools to show primary metrics, breakdowns, and actionable insights.

Apply design principles for dashboards, including hierarchy, contrast, and unity. Create high-fidelity prototypes within technology constraints, addressing color, layouts, branding, and data visualization best practices.

Assess technology considerations and constraints in dashboard prototyping, compare tools like Excel and Tablo, and explain bullet charts to keep prototypes realistic within tool capabilities.

design data visualizations and dashboards by selecting clear charts and graphs—bar, column, line, pie, heat map, and maps—tailored to users for insight and action.

Use color to enhance data visualizations and dashboards, not decorate them; distinguish data, show sequential scales, highlight items, and test for colorblindness and print in black and white.

Integrate user goals, KPIs, and storyboarded layouts with rapid prototyping to develop dashboard visuals and charts, then gather user feedback to refine layout and visual hierarchy.

In this prototyping step, learn do's and don'ts for designing consistent, accessible dashboards with clear charts, legends, tooltips, and timestamping to drive insights and action.

Validate dashboard design through internal reviews with the ideation team and stakeholders, set context with a prototype for end users, gather feedback on content and KPIs, and defend key choices.

Iterate and finalize your data visualization or dashboard by incorporating stakeholder and user feedback, refining to meet needs like clarity and drill-down ability, and sign off ready for development.

Wrap up the dashboard design by handing off to developers with finalized markup, interaction details, styling guidelines, and templates plus representative test data to support the prioritized KPIs.

Keep learning beyond the course with practical tools like the metrics and KPI template and a dashboard review checklist, plus book recommendations and websites for data visualization and dashboards.