Dashboards, or control panels, have become integral tools for business and beyond. They provide complete analytics and visual reports, which help to better understand the processes within the company and make informed decisions. If you’re new to the world of dashboards, this material will help you figure out how to use them in business and beyond.
What is a dashboard?
In simple words, a dashboard is an interactive analytical panel, a graphical interface. The point is that all key metrics, goals, or process indicators are located on one screen. Using these metrics, trends, and changes can be identified and analyzed. We come across dashboards every day. A dashboard in a car or activity graphs in a fitness bracelet app are all dashboards.
Examples of popular dashboards
- Google Analytics. Shows how site traffic changed minute by minute and where users came to the site from.
- CoinMarketCap. Shows how the rate of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies changed minute by minute, and provides other detailed statistics about digital coins.
- Dashboards allow you to combine data and summarize basic information across various parameters. They not only visualize key indicators but also allow you to track trends for different periods. This is the main advantage of dashboards compared to other visualization tools. Each business can have its dashboard; the main thing is to develop it well; fortunately, there are now enough specialists from Dashboard Development Services who can help you with this.
Types of dashboards
There are three main types of dashboards, but they can be combined:
- Operational – displays data changes in the business. Examples of dashboards for business are Yandex Metrics charts, with which you can see how site traffic has changed and what influenced it. After all, the user chooses for which period to look at the chart himself.
- Analytical – helps to explore trends and draw conclusions. They are usually created for a specific business unit. Analysts work with them to record deviations in indicators and track the causes. An example is the development of a dashboard about changes in the number of users of a specific product per week. With its help, you can see the average bill, the share of customers, and the percentage of turnover for each competitor.
- Strategic – needed to get an idea of the situation as a whole or about individual indicators, identify problems, and help to correct them. For example, creating a dashboard about staff loyalty will help you understand the degree of employee loyalty and track its changes among different groups.
Creation Tools
How to make a dashboard? Basic functions for creating them are available in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
MS Excel is considered the main tool for data analysis and is popular due to its accessibility, functionality, simplicity, and relative cheapness. It is used everywhere for storing, calculating, and aggregating data. Many services also can download data in MS Excel format. These spreadsheets are used by marketers, accountants, and HR all over the world. At a minimum, this is one of the most common sources of data for analytics. As a maximum, it allows you to build graphs, tables, and diagrams directly in the application.
Another plus is that MS Excel is included in the Microsoft Office package, which is installed on almost all devices with the Windows operating system.
To create dashboards and data analysis tasks, it is important to be able to apply filters and sort data at different levels, exclude data based on certain values, and create calculated fields of any complexity. There are special frameworks for developers of professional data analysts, such as Plotly Dash for Python.
There are also special services. For example, Power BI, Google Data Studio, Oracle Business Intelligence, Tableau, Foresight, SAS, Qlik, DataFan, and others. These are professional tools created specifically for business analytics.
When choosing a tool for creating a dashboard, you need to consider:
- Data sources. Different tools have different numbers of connected sources – for example, Google Data Studio has more than 490, including MySQL, Google Ad, and Google Sheets, as well as social networks Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook Analytics. Power BI has GitHub, Zendesk, Google BigQuer, Excel, and others.
- Number of users and size of processed data. If these numbers are going to increase, it’s important to choose a scalable tool. For example, Google Data Studio or Power BI.
- Performer skill level. There are easier and more difficult tools to use.
- Operating system. Please note that not all desktop versions work on MacOS – for example, Power BI does not work.
