Call Center Dashboard Design for Real-Time Situation Awareness
continued
Inappropriate visual salience
All information that deserves space on a dashboard is important (or ought to be), but not all information is of equal importance. On a call center dashboard, some items of information are probably always more important than the rest. For example, of all the measures of performance that you track, perhaps the three most important are current call hold time, call duration, and the abandoned call ratio. Because they're so important, they deserve a prominent location on the dashboard, and perhaps even more to make them stand out, such as a dark border surrounding them.
Other items might not be of great importance in general, but could be of utmost importance at any one moment, because something is going wrong that demands attention. For example, you might not always need to know how many of your agents are currently working, but if their number drops below some critical threshold, suddenly that measure takes on immediate importance— so much so that your attention needs to be drawn to it. On such occasions, the visual salience (that is, the degree to which it stands out) should be increased in some way.
When you design a dashboard, you should think hard about the relative importance of each item of information, and control the visual salience of the information to support the relative importance of each item. You should also incorporate ways of increasing the visual salience of items when conditions demand that they stand out. If everything on the dashboard is eye-catching, the result is that nothing stands out. Items can only be eff ectively highlighted if you begin with a fairly neutral and balanced display, except for those few items that are always important. If you use color sparingly, relying mostly on soft, natural, and relatively neutral colors for most items, such as gray, you set the stage for using bright and dark colors to draw attention when needed.
What's visually salient in the following dashboard? Everything and therefore nothing.
Figure 8: Sample dashboard from Technology Group International.
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