Part A. Go to Stephen Few’s blog “the Perceptual Edge” (http://www.perceptualedg
ID: 3875175 • Letter: P
Question
Part A.
Go to Stephen Few’s blog “the Perceptual Edge” (http://www.perceptualedge.com/). Go to the section of “Examples.” In this section, he provides critiques of various dashboard examples. Read at least 3-4 of these examples. Now go to http://www.dundas.com/. Select the "Dashboards and Reporting" section of the site. Once there, click the “Interactive Samples” selection. You will be shown a variety of different dashboard demos. Run a couple of the demos.
What sorts of information and metrics are shown on the demos? What sorts of actions can you take?
Using some of the basic concepts from Few's critiques, describe some of the good design points and bad design points of the demos.
Part B.
Watch the YouTube video about how to create a dashboard in Excel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIPcer_C4gM). (This is a series of videos but you should be able to create a simple dashboard by just watching this first introductory video.) Create a dashboard with at least 3 different charts. You can make up the data but some examples might be: income data, expenses data, calories consumed, calories burned, time spent exercising. In addition to the dashboard, include a brief narrative of the benefits of dashboards.
Explanation / Answer
A) these demos show various information and data in a graphical or pictorial format. It enables the effectiveness of the communication between data and audience. Different type of matrices may include sales, distribution, clients, in fact, all that data that can be visualized so that it becomes effective for the decision maker to make a decision. some bad design points would be-
1)too much use of colors or congested pictorials for the visualization this reduces the effectiveness of the data visualization as it becomes difficult to differentiate between data.
2)bad data-some data visualization uses bad data that mean data which is not cleaned or prepared properly or data which gives false information can be called bad data.
3) the wrong choice of data visualization-sometimes data is visualized using wrong plots for example and data which has geographical data can be best visualized by using geographical plots and also using pie charts is not best always it is better to use some other plots for data visualizing.
Some good points are-
1)Choose the right chart for visualization- for example, bar charts are the most used chart type, and possibly for good reason: they are simple to read. So use of charts which best for your data is a very good data visualization technique.
2) Use minimum colors- Too many colors in a data visualization makes it difficult for the reader to interpret what kind of information is shown by the data. use of limited colors, in fact, different shades of a color makes a data visualization very effective.