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.
Michael W Cristiani says
Say, “Amen!”, brother!
Bob says
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
Jon Peltier says
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.
Bob says
Thanks Jon,
I’ll implement your recommendations. Looks like my weekend will be spent experimenting with colour and layout.
Cheers,
Bob
Esakki Rajan says
I am agreeing your point “A good dashboard does not need animation.” But I cannot accept fully. Your point is not useful for a energetic guy trying to show something with graphics as presentation. Some time funny is required to attract the people via animation. Otherwise it will get boring to work with that. While submitting the presentation for the inspection, animation will change the mind set of the people.
Jon Peltier says
I think this paraphrased quote is attributed to Tufte: If your data is too boring, maybe you need new data.