Dashboard Design for Real-Time Situation Awareness

by Stephen Few, author of Information Dashboard Design

Few, if any, recent trends in business information delivery have inspired as much enthusiasm as dashboards. When they work, they provide a powerful means to tame the beast of data overload. Despite their popularity, however, most dashboards live up to only a fraction of their potential. They fail, not because of poor technology — at least not primarily — but because of poor design. The more critical that information is to the well being of the business, the more grievous is the failure, because the remedy is so readily available.

The term "dashboard" refers to a single screen information display that is used to monitor what's going on in some aspect of the business. The key word is "monitor." A dashboard presents the key data that you must efficiently monitor to maintain awareness of what's going on in your area of responsibility. Most dashboards are used to monitor information once a day, because more frequent use is unnecessary given the rate at which the information changes and speed at which responses must be made. Some jobs, however, require constant monitoring in real time, or close to it, because the activities that you track are happening right now and delays in responding can't be tolerated. There is perhaps no better example of this type of dashboard than one that monitors the brisk and sometimes harried activities of a call center.

Much like air traffic control systems or cockpits in airplanes, call center dashboards must be designed to support real-time "situation awareness." They must grab your attention when it's needed, they must make it easy to spot what's most important in a screen full of data, and they must give you the means to understand what's happening and respond without delay. To do this, they require expert visual design and must express measures of performance clearly, accurately, directly, and without distraction.

I've written an entire book about the visual design of dashboards in general, entitled Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. My purpose in this white paper is not to repeat in summary form what I've already done, but rather to narrow and sharpen my focus on the specific design requirements of dashboards that are used to maintain real-time situation awareness. I am approaching this task with an eye on call center monitoring as an example of how the principles and practices that I advocate can be applied to solve a real-world challenge.

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