PRDV200: Communicating with Data

In the age of big data, people are cognitively overloaded with vast amounts of information. Business intelligence and analytics, particularly data visualization dashboards, are solutions to present insightful information to target users efficiently. A dashboard is defined by Few as "a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance". In a recent review, Sarikaya et al. organized 15 aspects of a dashboard into four categories: purpose (strategic, tactical, and operational decisions and learning), audience (circulation, required visualization literacy, and required domain expertise), visual features (construction and composition, multiple pages, interactive interface, highlighting and annotating, and modifying state of the data or world), and data semantics (alerts and notification, benchmarks, and updating).

A commonly encountered difficulty in dashboard design is that information technology (IT) engineers who are skilled at programming might not be familiar with the domain knowledge and mindset of professionals (e.g., medical doctors, nurses, scientists, lawyers, accountants, journalists, and artists) in different fields. By contrast, domain professionals specialized in a particular field might be unaware of IT techniques that can help them unfetter their imagination and create attractive dashboards. IT engineers and domain professionals must discuss at length to create best-fit dashboards.

Dashboards are for not only professional situations but also personal and recreational purposes. For example, Shneiderman et al. stated that casual users at home need to navigate thousands of movies to find the perfect entertainment for a night in, browse hundreds of social media updates daily to keep abreast of their circle of friends, and scan through thousands of product reviews to find the right toaster to buy. This development has been termed as "casual visualization,"which involves nonexpert users.

In response to the aforementioned difficulties and trends, self-service business intelligence (SSBI) has been developed. User-friendly SSBI tools (such as Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI) can help non-IT professionals and nonexpert casual users to perform custom analytics and to derive actionable information from large amounts of data without involving IT experts.

Because SSBI tools are increasingly used by various target audiences, we aimed to derive dashboard design principles to present insightful information to target users efficiently. This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the research approach. Section 3 provides the recommended design principles from the literature. Section 4 illustrates dashboards created by a focus group applying the recommended principles by using data regarding quality of diabetes care. In Section 5, 5S dashboard design principles are proposed. Finally, the benefits and challenges of 5S principles are discussed, and conclusions are drawn in Section 6.