The Dashboard Spy wrote about Animating Dashboard Charts with Flash on the Dashboards by Example blog. The examples in the Spy’s post were taken from our friends at Fusion Charts:

1. financial flash dashboard demo
2. sales flash dashboard demo
3. sales management dashboard
4. airline dashboard demo

As I discussed in my comment to the Spy’s post is that a little animation goes a long way.

If “animation” only means slick effects showing the graphics being constructed, then it is a waste of resources and of the user’s time. A good dashboard does not need animation. The graphics should appear instantly in their completed state.

If the animation shows the user how conditions or performance have changed over time, then it may be a worthwhile animation. It must be done cleanly, with controls that allow the user to stop and start the animation, and stop at any intermediate place during the process. I have described a number of animation examples in this blog, and all of them show the development of one state from another, with playback control buttons that everyone is familiar with. But this type of animation is usually better for more detailed descriptions than are effective in a dashboard.

A good dashboard could also benefit from interaction, rather than animation. Interaction may mean the ability of a user to drill down on a chart to see further information, or the ability to change some inputs to see effects on predicted behavior.

The animations provided in the Fusion Charts examples do nothing to elaborate on the data. They do not clarify information in the data. They serve only to entertain the user instead of instantly showing the information that was called up. Therefore the Fusion Charts animation qualifies as gratuitous eye candy. Such animation does not belong in any effective business dashboard.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Dashboards
• Gapminder for Excel
• Dashboard Competition
• Bad Graphics - Stacked Pyramid Chart
• Nice Dashboard Examples
• Seth’s Three Laws of Great Graphs
• Charting Seasonal Sales Data in Excel using Cycle Plots
• Bad Graphics - Funnel Chart