This post addresses a post on Dashboard Insight’s site titled, “7 Small Business Dashboard Design Dos and Dont’s”
Hi Stacey,
I read your post with great interest, after all, who wouldn’t like to know the 7 rules of dashboard design? As soon as I got to the 19th word of your post, “colorful” I knew that we’d have some interesting differences in our viewpoints.
So let’s start with how you define a dashboard. I agree with most of your definition, especially the part about face-smacking insights. Certainly a useful dashboard should provide the …

TinkerPlots is data exploration software aimed at kids, the beautiful thing about it is that it’s great for adults too. The creators of this tool have designed the software in such a way that it gets out of your way, and encourages you to explore data, not fight with the interface.

December’s unemployment figures show continued increase in long-term unemployed population. They now account for 40% of all jobless Americans. Read and see more in my award winning information dashboard of unemployment in the U.S.

Last month real unemployment stood at 17.5% and 27.4 million Americans were out of work. These aren’t the figures you’ll hear or read in the media, but they’re very important nonetheless.

The smart money knows that insights are often buried deep in data. So go beyond the headlines and check out this detailed dashboard for valuable insights into Unemployment that you won’t see anywhere else.

Protovis small multiple mockup of bls.gov data showing 10 yr trend of weekly hours of production for 39 industries, courtesy the Business Intelligence Guru.

Averages have their place, but the smart money knows that insights are often buried deep in data. Check out this detailed dashboard for valuable insights that you won’t see on TV or read in the papers.

Of all the open source developer visualization tool kits I’ve seen so far, the one I stumbled upon today (thanks Moritz Stefaner), named Protovis, seems the most practical and easy to use. Protovis comes from Stanford’s visualization group, with the help of Jeff Heer and Michael Bostock.

Below is a screen grab of some of the visualizations created using Protovis.

While there are some graphs in the examples that we might want to stay away from, those radial fan (sunburst?) type charts are just plain confusing, I think the ability …