Animated Dashboards?
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2009.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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:
- financial flash dashboard demo
- sales flash dashboard demo
- sales management dashboard
- 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:
- Gapminder for Excel
- Dashboards
- Deceptive Decline in Interest Rates
- Dashboard Competition
- Bad Graphics – Stacked Pyramid Chart
- Accordion Chart for Jorge
- Seth’s Three Laws of Great Graphs
- Nice Dashboard Examples
- Gas Prices – Interactive Time Series
- Review of Xcelsius Present
Posted: Monday, September 29th, 2008 under Dashboards.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from Michael W Cristiani
Time: Tuesday, September 30, 2008, 9:52 am
Say, “Amen!”, brother!
Comment from Bob
Time: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 2:08 pm
Hi Jon,
Happy New Year.
I have designed a project status dashboard in Excel that is modelled (albeit poorly) on the winning Airlines Sparkline sample that Fabrice Rimlinger includes in his add in and that is used by the commercial product.
I’ve made the dasboard as dense as possible, but now I also need to project the status onto display via projector on the laptop.
What is good for a single user on a 1024 x 768 laptop screen is now useless when projected. Have you seen any articles about project dashboards used in presentations?
I’ve had to add more colour than I would like and hide some of the lower information content columns to make it useable.
Do you have any suggestions?
Cheers,
Bob
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 3:12 pm
Bob -
I’ve used various projectors while giving classes, and I’ve only ever used one that did justice to what I was displaying. Most of them have a smaller effective size, and the colors are awful.
The same way that I suggest people use different views (i.e., different worksheets) for printed and for on-screen reports, you should use a separate sheet for your projected reports. Figure out the size you can get away with, and try to limit yourself to B&W and maybe two or three colors. They won’t be the colors you’d use on screen, either. You’ll have to experiment to find a few distinct colors which aren’t completely ugly.
Comment from Bob
Time: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 4:29 pm
Thanks Jon,
I’ll implement your recommendations. Looks like my weekend will be spent experimenting with colour and layout.
Cheers,
Bob
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