performance dashboard

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Graphics are not decorations. Apart from the fact that you can go free-for-all with color, pie, bar, car dashboard guages kooky style and background images, there are many reasons why you should not. Above all, you want to make sure that your graph showing the size of your business performance in ways that make it clear to you what happens, whether you need to do something.

There are 5 features a very subtle but deliberate measures that make graphs of your performance speak so clearly that it can feel like a slap in the face of a very focused:

1. Use a line graph as the default.

Line graphs are best visual method to show changes through time, and that is what measure of performance - most of them too - is to. We want to see if the performance gets worse, the better or not changed at all. Bar graph okay if you did not have a lot of historical data, and fewer than a dozen of the value of time series to measure the performance of your display. Almost all my performance measures, including my New Registration measure that tracks new customers for the week by week email newsletter, is shown in the graph lines.

2. Including at least 20 points from historical data.

To truly confident conclusions about trends or changes in performance from time to time, you need more data than you think. You need at least 20 values of time series to measure your performance. There are statistical reasons for this, and it relies on the fact that there is always some level of natural variation in the value of our actions are always there even when nothing has changed. You should focus on patterns through time, rather than the difference between this month and last month. New Registration In my chart, has historical value clearly shows the sudden growth in the rate of signups since August 2009.

3. Add a line to the average level of current performance highlights.

Because of the difference between this month and last month, almost never mean anything, because of natural variations, this is much more meaningful to focus on the average level of performance. I'm not talking about the values of overall average your 20 gauge. I'm talking about the level of average performance during the exhibition. New Registration In my graph, the average rate of 115 per week only accounts for the values that are part of a new trend since August 2009. Before that, on average more around 25 per week. Currently predict the level of the average amount of new signups I'll probably continue to get if there were no significant changes.

4. Keep it clean and neat - let the data dominate.

I certainly do not want to stop you from having fun with your dashboard (I know many people feel that boring numbers and they need all the help they can be interesting). But I want to warn you about when decorating distort and distract you from what your performance measures are actually trying to say. What is most striking about the graph of my New Registration? Data not. I've been using color to highlight rows in the table, and everything is quiet. Incidentally, I use the colors of the flag that measures a glimpse of the process of my business: Marketing (red), Sales (purple), Service Delivery (green), Product Development (blue).

5. Use the title of the graph to stay focused on the goal.

This one is optional but I like it. You state your goals in the title of the graph, thus making a clear performance measure but also targets that you're trying to accomplish. My chart title is "New Registration at least 250 per week" and that encourages me to always check if my average current performance levels move closer to the target - or not!

Please appreciate that this is not a complete list of how to design amazing graphics. But that was the beginning of the extraordinary!

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