Dashboard Design: Examples, Layouts, and Best Practices
As an integral part of business intelligence tools, dashboards have been game-changing for businesses.
Dashboards allow businesses to make use of their data and gain a comprehensive view of company performance, with clear data visualizations that present easy-to-digest insights.
More than this, data insights obtained from dashboards can be used by different individuals and departments to further their success by using both current and historical data to guide their decisions about everything from marketing to operations.
However, just as important as the data itself, effective dashboard design is critical to getting across the message conveyed by the data.
With this in mind, we’re letting you in on all the must-have dashboard knowledge — from dashboard types and dashboard layout examples to draw your own inspiration, to the seven best practices to follow for optimal results. So you can understand and share your data story for more effective business decisions.
What is a dashboard?
A dashboard is a data visualization tool. It collects and combines vast amounts of complex data from your entire tech stack, whether in the cloud or on-premise. It transforms raw data from files, apps, platforms, spreadsheets, and other sources into easy-to-understand data visualizations. These tables, charts, and graphs are dynamic and adjust as new data arrives, so you always see your information in real time.
Dashboards can help businesses better understand their overall performance, customer relationships, financial data, worker productivity, marketing campaigns, and more. Using a dashboard is a much simpler process for analyzing your data, saving you time and effort so you can focus on developing insights and taking action.
Since our dashboards don’t require coding or tech expertise to operate, anyone from team members to department managers, C-suite executives, board members, stakeholders, and clients can easily navigate data, become more informed, and make data-driven decisions.
Types of Dashboards
The best dashboard design for your business begins with understanding which type of dashboard you need.
Operational dashboards
This dashboard lets you track your short-term business operations and monitor your overall performance. It provides real-time information to assess whether your business operations are on target, helps identify trends, changes, or potential problems, and allows you to make adjustments as you go rather than after the fact. Operational dashboards help improve business processes and increase efficiency and productivity for better performance.
Analytical dashboards
This more complex dashboard type includes your historical data. Analytical dashboards help you identify past trends and make future predictions. You can combine and explore extensive data sets with this dashboard. It also allows users to delve deeper into their data through queries and filters to understand data points across multiple variables. For example, a sales analytical dashboard lets you evaluate sales performance across products, distribution channels, and sales team members so you can develop more precise insights.
Strategic dashboards
This type of dashboard is ideal for those looking to monitor their long-term business strategies and performance. You’ll view organization-wide data and goals alongside the day-to-day performance metrics you’re tracking.
For instance, you can compare your current KPIs to a summary of last quarter’s performance or your year-over-year data to better evaluate your current standing. A strategic dashboard gives you both a granular and bird’s eye view of your data to ensure you’re on track to achieve your larger business goals.
Dashboard Design Examples for Inspiration
Whether you’re working with large, complex data sets, need to analyze multiple platforms and variables, or just desire a simpler way to understand and explore your data, we have a wide range of dashboard designs available.
Explore our dashboard layout examples below to get ideas and inspiration for your own.
Google Analytics
This data dashboard design is filled with a wide range of performance data for your business. Easily monitor the performance of your websites, apps, ecommerce stores, social media accounts, and more through this one simplified platform. Our simple yet informative Google Analytics dashboard lets you track KPIs like traffic, session and user data, lead generation, conversions, revenue, costs, and return on investment (ROI). You’ll get a clear picture of your entire business data to optimize performance.
Project Management
Every project manager looks for ways to increase efficiency, team collaboration, and productivity while delivering projects that wow clients. With our project management dashboard, you can do just that, regardless of your industry or sector. This simple dashboard design presents your essential project information with charts, tables, and gauges so you can easily monitor each project’s status, task progress, budget, and timeline.
Salesforce
Grow your customer relationships and business with our Salesforce dashboard. This dynamic dashboard design helps you track, analyze, and optimize all aspects of your customer relationship management (CRM) data to enhance marketing efforts, sales opportunities, and customer experience. Quickly see where your leads come from, which marketing channels offer the best ROI, and evaluate your top sales metrics like average contract value or sales activity.
Executive/CEO
Corporate leaders need a holistic, bird’s eye view of their company’s data to monitor overall performance and ensure they stay on track to reach enterprise-wide goals. Our easy-to-use yet informative executive summary dashboard allows high-level executives to quickly review essential KPIs from each department. You can quickly spot trends or emerging issues and make data-informed decisions to move your business forward.
Facebook Ads
Assess and optimize your Facebook Ads performance by exploring KPIs to increase awareness, traffic, and conversions. Our cool dashboard design features scatter plots, maps, colorful charts, and dynamic graphs so you can easily draw meaning from your data. Compare campaign data like reach, engagement, unique vs. overall impressions, likes, costs, and ROI through different variables to get the most out of your ad campaigns.
Shopify
Better understand your ecommerce data to improve sales and business performance with our Shopify dashboard. With our data dashboard design, you can find out who your most valuable customers are, compare your current revenue with historical data, view your customer retention rates, determine what percentage of purchases come from new customers, and more, all on one page. Compare your marketing efforts with customer purchasing data to identify trends or better align your strategies.
Email Marketing
Grow your email list, increase conversion rates, or ensure deliverability with our email marketing dashboard. Don’t let the simple dashboard design fool you. This powerful tool helps you run A/B tests to optimize your open and click-through rates, increase email-driven traffic to your website, and grow your conversions and sales. Track additional KPIs like bounce rate, delivery rate, new subscribers, unsubscribes, and most opened emails to improve performance.
SEMrush
Track all your SEMrush keyword and search term performance for all your search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), social media, advertising, and marketing campaigns through one data dashboard design. Monitor keyword or search query KPIs like number of impressions or clicks and average page time to measure and compare engagement, relevance, and overall performance between campaigns. Use the data to align different marketing channels or maximize your future efforts.
Financial
Sophisticated financial analytics tools don’t have to be complicated. Our simple dashboard design empowers your finance and accounting teams to visualize, monitor, and report on your critical financial KPIs to reduce costs and increase profitability. View your revenue by department or product, monitor cash flow, investments, and other assets, explore your business expenses in detail, and forecast expected revenue and costs.
Small Business
You don’t have to be a major corporation to benefit from data analytics. Our all-in-one small business data dashboard design tracks your top customer behavior and marketing KPIs to boost performance and growth. Explore your revenue and expenses, track your organic search performance, and monitor marketing, sales, and website KPIs like bounce, clicks, and conversions.
Dashboard Design Best Practices
Designing dashboards involves more than just knowing the type of dashboard or visualizations you want. You also need to understand the principles and practices of what makes a good dashboard.
With this in mind, here are seven guidelines for effective dashboard design that allow the story told by data to be understood easily—and instantly.
- Determine the objective of your dashboard
To execute a stellar dashboard design, it’s essential to first determine your dashboard’s goals. Are you tracking financial data? Marketing campaigns? Overall business performance? It’s critical that your dashboard has one clear objective to reach.
To accomplish this, make sure to consider your audience. It’s a good idea to talk to the dashboard’s end-users to determine what they need most from the dashboard. What questions are they looking to answer? What are the most important metrics to track? How much detail do they need?
If it’s not feasible to talk to end-users about the dashboard— perhaps C-suite executives or marketing clients— you can tailor your dashboard design using what you know about these audiences.
For example, C-suite executives will need a dashboard that shows an accurate overview of company performance, with plenty of opportunities to click through and view the data in more detail.
On the other hand, when executing dashboard design with marketing in mind, the priority is clarity and value.
Marketing clients want to know your campaigns are getting them results and your work is worth the value. In this case, your dashboard design should focus on telling the story illustrated by the data, ensuring that everything is clearly labeled to eliminate the chance of clients misinterpreting the meaning of the data visualizations.
Once you’ve determined what your audience needs from your dashboard— and outlined what the exact purpose of the dashboard is— you can begin to select the components that make it up.
- Choose only the most relevant KPIs
Your dashboard design should be no more than a single screen, with enough information to allow the viewer to understand the story depicted by the data, but not so much that it’s difficult to take it all in.
If your dashboard design is too busy, your audience will likely become disengaged from the dashboard and potentially miss important details.
With this in mind, choosing the five to nine most important metrics to display as data visualizations is a good idea, presenting enough detail to knowledgeably drive decisions but not so much to overwhelm the viewer and distract them from the most essential messages given by the data.
As a rule of thumb, your viewer should be able to surmise the key insights from your dashboard within five seconds of viewing. If that’s not possible, you might consider reducing the number of KPIs on your dashboard.
- Keep data visualizations simple and appropriate
When you’ve selected the metrics— and the data— most critical to fulfilling the objective of a particular dashboard, it’s important to choose the right data visualization for that data and for the overall dashboard design.
For example, bar charts are a great choice to compare multiple variables, while line graphs are best for displaying data that changes over time.
Something to watch out for at this point in your dashboard design journey is that you’re not overdoing the visualizations. Great dashboard design favors clarity and simplicity.
So, if you’re trying to highlight a metric that can be summarized by a single figure, don’t try to do anything fancy like add a gauge chart when just the number and a clear label will do the trick.
Likewise, certain visualizations can distort the significance of some data, so you should always try to pick the visualization that most objectively depicts the story the data is telling. For example, data visualizations such as 3D pie charts can sometimes exaggerate the appearance of data values and categories, so they might be perceived to be more significant than they are.
- Position visualizations strategically
More than the data you choose and the visualizations you opt to use, the positioning of each component is similarly important to creating the most effective dashboard design.
In general, you should display the most critical metric in the top left corner of the dashboard since this is where the eye naturally wanders first (in languages where the natural reading pattern is from left to right, as with English).
Like with reading, the user’s gaze will likely travel across the top row, then to the left of the middle row, and so forth.
With this in mind, it’s a good idea to display visualizations in this order, in a way that best illustrates the story told by the data, allowing you to carry out dashboard storytelling with your dashboard design.
Many dashboard design experts also choose to use an ‘inverted pyramid’ approach, which can be used simultaneously to– or in place of– the above. This is where the most significant metrics are placed on the top row, trends are displayed in the middle row, and granularity is positioned at the bottom of the page for users who want to see more detail.
Moreover, you can group related metrics or visualizations that you want to be read together by using differing amounts of white space to emphasize different groups of metrics and visualizations.
- Provide context
As we mentioned earlier, clarity is a defining characteristic of a well-executed dashboard design.
Without context, numbers are just numbers, and data visualizations are just graphs. With that being said, there are a couple of ways in which you can provide context.
The first step is ensuring that data visualizations are contextualized by making sure that graphs are clearly titled and labeled so users can’t misinterpret what they’re seeing.
Second, users often won’t have the background knowledge to know if a number is good or bad. To fill this gap, historical data is usually necessary to provide context on whether a recorded metric is on track, worse, or better than it has been in the past.
Likewise, it can also be helpful to use color – such as red and green – to highlight whether a metric is meeting or falling behind on your goals.
- Eliminate clutter
To allow users to focus on what they need to– a.k.a. on the data visualizations and the story told by the data– it is essential to make sure your dashboard is free from clutter.
This includes avoiding unnecessary decoration, including grids or lines that don’t serve a function, as well as forgoing complex data visualizations when simpler visualizations will convey the data findings just as well– and with less confusion on the user’s part.
This can also mean using abbreviations, such as using a ‘%’ sign, rather than typing out ‘percentage’ to reduce the busy appearance of the dashboard.
Moreover, having sufficient white space is necessary to make the whole dashboard easier to take in and to avoid overwhelming the viewer. White space plays a big role in executing dashboard design with a clutter-free appearance.
- Use a consistent design scheme
Another tip to ensure your dashboard design is telling the story of the data as clearly as possible is to be consistent.
What we mean by this is that if two or more sets of data are related, it’s best to use the same kind of data visualization for that data– rather than use as many different types of charts and graphs as possible– so that data can be more easily compared and analyzed.
This is a good idea when comparing the same metrics for a few different things; it’s a lot easier to see how the performance of, for example, three products differs when the design is the same, so that differences in design aren’t interpreted as differences in data.
For the same reason, using a consistent color scheme throughout your dashboard design can help to eliminate any potential confusion.
Dashboard design: the key to powerful BI
Dashboards are the core of most businesses’ BI strategy. To make the best use of their BI tool, businesses need to design and implement useful, intuitive dashboards, and they need to know how to design good dashboards to do that.
The basics of dashboard design aren’t difficult to understand, but dashboard designers do need to recognize them. At their core, dashboards need to be focused on meeting one business need, should have a clear visual hierarchy, and should present their metrics in the most effective way possible.
The best way to make good use of dashboards is to buy a BI tool that has powerful dashboarding and visualization features. Your BI tool should have the features you need to build the most effective dashboards possible.