6 Best Practices for Creating Effiective Dashboards

Dashboards are an effective tool for distilling data into actionable insights; still, they're often an overlooked and underutilized tool.

Well-planned dashboards can align your organization's efforts, speed up decision-making, track performance outcomes, and increase ROI. Yet too often mistakes are made in the actual creation of dashboards—many times at the expense of efficiency, accuracy and hours of lost time.

Well-planned dashboards can align your organization's efforts, speed up decision-making, track performance outcomes, and increase ROI. Yet too often mistakes are made in the actual creation of dashboards—many times at the expense of efficiency, accuracy and hours of lost time.

In order to see and understand the complete picture and make fast, data-driven decisions, you'll need to build dashboards that can show you what's really happening across many sets of data, correlate patterns across multiple metrics, and provide both a summary and in-depth views of performance. The 'single source of truth' dashboard is no myth.

So how do you build dashboards that will live up to this promise? How do you build the dashboards that are just right for your goals, your team, and your company?

Dashboards that meet these needs offer data-agnostic connections and the ability to blend multiple data sources. They also present data visually for faster understanding and allow sharing and mobile options for better collaboration and convenience.

For improved dashboards, start by considering the following six best practices; equally important, keep an eye out for a bonus section with five critical mistakes you don't want to make.

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