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Just Build Me a Dashboard!
Summary
How to bring data visualization best practices into your products, from dashboards to reports to BI tools. Learn about which charts to use when, creating accessible color palettes, and preview some new visualizations Theresa Neil has been testing in enterprise organizations.
Key Insights
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Clients often request 'sexy' dashboards without clear user questions or goals, leading to ineffective visualizations.
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Understanding whether a dashboard is exploratory or explanatory shapes design and chart selection.
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Starting data visualization projects by focusing on users and their questions is crucial, not just the data.
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Simple data presentations (like a single number with explanation) can outperform complex charts when users struggle to interpret visuals.
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Using inappropriate or inherited marketing color palettes in dashboards can cause false data associations and accessibility issues.
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Creating dedicated data visualization color palettes (qualitative, sequential, binary, diverging) that are accessible and brand-aligned improves interpretability.
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Tools like Viz Palette enable designers to check color accessibility across chart types and color blindness variants interactively.
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Advanced visualizations like multigrain charts and correlated charts help users analyze complex, temporal, or cause-effect data relationships.
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Mobile and dark mode designs must be approached with different user contexts in mind, especially for operations center environments.
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Effective dashboards limit the number of key metrics to tell a clear story rather than overwhelm users with all available data.
Notable Quotes
"Make me a dashboard, no matter what, is the one thing I've heard more than anything else for 20 years."
"Sexy dashboards is something I've heard from companies ranging from patent law to genomics."
"The real question is who's gonna be using this dashboard and what questions are they trying to answer."
"Our general public, even advanced enterprise users, often struggle to interpret even the most basic charts."
"Color tells you where to look. That’s why color in data visualization must be intentional."
"Inheriting marketing style guides is the biggest mistake in data visualization color use because they’re usually not appropriate."
"We don’t want ugly charts for accessibility, we want good chart colors that complement the brand and remain accessible."
"Sometimes the best answer isn’t a chart but a single number augmented with explanatory text."
"Dark mode is particularly useful in network and security operations centers where visibility in dark rooms is critical."
"You have to start with users, not the data, and force prioritization to avoid dashboard overload."
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