Dashboard Excellence: A Beginner’s Guide
Management Summary
If you are reading this, you have most likely tried to read a dashboard before and struggled to understand it. You may have even felt bad because you were not sure whether the numbers referred to the current or the previous month. Perhaps you could not tell whether the different shades of gray in a donut chart represented one traffic source or another because they lacked sufficient contrast. Rest assured: you are not alone. The world of digital marketing is littered with dashboards that feel like an obstacle course. In this introductory article on Dashboard Excellence, I will show you how to create better dashboards—from thinking like your dashboard’s audience to the most common mistakes, best practices, and other tricks.
What exactly is a dashboard?
In one of my first jobs as a data analysis professional, I was asked to create a dashboard to be used by a department responsible for customer support via phone calls. Their main goal was to understand how many calls they needed to expect at any given time so they could adjust their capacity on the fly. This was made possible by tracking online interactions that led to active calls from this area of the company. They wanted to be able to tell at a glance at a screen—mounted on the wall—whether they needed to shift the team’s focus or even call IT. The call center managers I was working for certainly could not sift through all the web analytics metrics, but they were great at understanding their KPIs.
This quickly taught me what a dashboard should not be: a dumping ground for every metric you have ever tracked. It is a single, focused canvas that gathers related data, establishes a clear order, and delivers an “aha moment” within seconds. That last metric, seconds, is important. If users have to stare at cryptic labels, zoom into donut segments, or scroll through tabs just to grasp the basics, you have not built a dashboard but a tedious chore.
Stop confusing reports and dashboards!
Reports and dashboards serve different purposes. A report dives deep into a dataset and dwells on historical context. A dashboard, on the other hand, blends multiple data sources into a live snapshot and invites interaction through filters and time range controls. Analysts love reports because they can pick up every thread; decision-makers love dashboards because they get quick clarity. Confusing them sabotages everyone.
The three core dashboard archetypes
Creating a dashboard starts with understanding who will use it. Build the wrong type for the wrong audience, and rest assured they will lose focus. Build the right type for the right audience, and everyone might get promoted! Most dashboards fall into one of three archetypes:
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01
Operational dashboards
Operational dashboards function as a command center, tracking live campaign velocity, ad spend, or site availability. Like the call center team example I mentioned earlier: does someone need to monitor in real time whether something is broken?
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Strategic dashboards
Strategic dashboards focus on long-term goals and targets (KPIs). Typically delivered to people who want the answer to “Are we meeting our monthly target?”
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Analytical dashboards
Analytical dashboards provide a sandbox for power users, allowing them to break down reports, use different filters, and apply their expertise to dive deep into the data and conduct their analyses.
Common dashboard sins (and why they hurt)
Some design flaws are quite common in dashboards. Confusing layouts force users to play hide-and-seek with KPIs, while scrolling buries context off-screen where it might be forgotten. Data bloat—unnecessary decimal places, redundant metrics—undermines what is valuable, and context-free numbers (“Sessions: 12,430”) leave stakeholders guessing whether that number is cause for celebration or panic. An excessive number of charts is another common sin: gauges, 3D bars, and unnecessary gradients cause headaches, not insights. Other visual clutter, such as drop shadows, icons, rainbow color palettes, adds nothing meaningful and distracts attention from what really matters. Using them sparingly may be fine, but try leaving them out and see if it improves.
How to get started with Dashboard Excellence
Start every dashboard project with the question, not the data. Stakeholders rarely wake up craving a “pivot table of everything”; much more often they want to know whether their spending is driving growth. Design the entire experience based on that one question. Next, enforce a clear structure: arrange content from left to right and top to bottom, place core KPIs above the fold (visible without scrolling), and hide drill-downs one click away. Conciseness matters: summarize raw numbers into rates, deltas, internal team targets, and benchmarks so users always see “good” or “bad” at a glance, and keep scales consistent. Remember, if a metric is only “nice to have,” it may be better not to include it in the dashboard at all.
Storytelling then transforms raw metrics into meaning. Data points are Lego bricks; your narrative is the manual that turns them into the Millennium Falcon. Arrange visualizations so that each answers the next logical “Why?” question. It is much easier to remember what each part of a dashboard is meant to communicate when correlated visualizations are placed side by side.
Image: lego.com
I vividly remember working with a company that insisted on meticulously using their color palette in dashboards. The problem was that it consisted of fifty shades of gray (trust me, not as sexy as it sounds) and red. The whole thing looked like an error fest. Good design principles reinforce the story you want to tell: use a restrained color palette (approximately 60% neutral, 30% brand, 10% alert), choose screen-optimized fonts, and let white space give elements room to breathe. Finally: iterate without fear. Launch version one, observe how real users interact with it, and refine. Tools like Power BI, Tableau, and Looker Studio change; human cognition does not. User testing is the fastest way to understand whether you have succeeded.
Tool-agnostic, principle-obsessed
It does not matter whether you use BigQuery in Looker Studio, write DAX in Power BI, or iterate a Tableau visualization—the principles above apply. Tools are just vehicles, you are the pilot. You cannot rescue a confusing dashboard by switching platforms, any more than you can fix a bad book by changing the font—unless you start with Papyrus, perhaps.
Conclusion
A dashboard earns the title “excellent” when it reduces decision time from hours to minutes—ideally seconds. Anything less is noise. Build with intention, tell a concise story, and never force your audience to search for meaning. If you want to see what that looks like in your organization, let’s talk. Creating excellent dashboards that drive growth is one of our specialties.
