The Big Book of Dashboards: Visualizing Your Data Using Real-World Business Scenarios

I really enjoyed BBOD, and I am incorporating its many nuggets into my dashboards. Learning by example and counter-example is the best method (see Siegfried Engelmann fore more on that), and that's the format of this book. There are related webinars on the Tableau website that are definitely worth listening to.The thing to keep in mind about this book is that's it's not a step-by-step cookbook of how to technically achieve vizzes in Tableau. It's a book about design. It can quickly take you from making average, hum-drum (if not disorganized and confusing) dashboards to world-class material. Below are some thoughts on certain vizzes/chapters: · CH 2 and 20 - Course Metrics and Complaints - I would encourage Tableau to research gray text readability. Perhaps I have a genetic rod deficiency, or maybe it's because of my age, but I find the gray text to be hard to read. I think the effort to reduce contrast crosses a usability threshold. I'd like to see some tests of a type "solve a problem in this dashboard" with different gray scales in text. I'd wager darker equals a faster solution up to a certain point after which it doesn't matter. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this: monitor size, font size, bold, brightness, contrast, so you have to experiment with what works for you and the majority or your users. · CH 11 - Premier League Player Performance Metric. I think the applicability of this viz approach can be generalized even further to unit:subset:universe. For this football (soccer) viz, it's the most recent match, 5 next most recent, then all season. So the viz is by sets according to time. It could also be by organizational hierarchy as in employee: department: division for a fixed time period. In this same manner, Chapter 3 (speaker ratings) is conceptually equivalent, but it lacks the subset level. You could have speaker, topic area, and then all others. CH 12 - Rugby Dashboard - This is an interesting chapter. One option for a scoring viz us using Gantt Bars. t would be nice the book's dashboard were shaded between the lines to emphasize who is leading. I know this is a long-sought (by some) Tableau function, and maybe it's not too hard to implement if it's reimagined as a "Gantt Line", which would be identical to a Gantt Bar use case, except that it graphs lines while coloring the intermediate space. You can kinda do that with 3 levels of unstacked area charts... but not exactly. · CH 21 - Overall, I like the aesthetics of the Hospital Operating room dashboard, but I expected the screaming cat icon ("don't do this!") over the top of it. The calendar of the viz resembles the periodic table of elements, and the labels seem to be at odds with the "reduce clutter" guideline. The numbers are just a bit too much for me, but they could be exactly what the customer wanted in this case. Hey, chemists LIKE the periodic table! And some people don't want to hover for tooltip details, or they may have other motivations. I like to try to put myself in the shoes of the consumer and ask "Would the color itself be sufficient for me to make an actionable decision?" To me, the numbers don't have to be on the viz, and the calendars can be shrunken to show other information, but the dashboard isn't designed for me. Overall, this book is a "top shelf" selection on dashboard design that you can revisit over and over for best practices.

This book is a must have for many data visualization specialists, particularly if you use Tableau. In general I was very happy with this book. The selected dashboards that were presented were good representations of what can be needed in different situations. The accompanying explanations helped make sense why decisions were appropriate, or what might be improved. The quality of the color print made the illustrations easy on the eyes and there wasn't guesswork about what was being included in a dashboard or what color combination was involved. My only criticism was that the layout could have been improved- text would frequently reference a screenshot that wasn't visible until the page was turned.

In the companies I usually see people not knowing from where to start in building their dashboard. And telling them "think about the story and your workflow" is not sufficient. The book gives good starting point to such users - examples, why they work, what are other applications. If you are searching for reference/guidelines/inspiration for business dashboards it is good book. However, infographics are barely covered - missing some good examples of interactive work that is between dashboard and infographic. Technology has come far to support more than static. However if you have longer experience in the field, you will find yourself thinking that authors failed in making every chapter be excellent. Some chapters seemed well thought and detailed, while some chapters seemed as not providing enough discussion - you see that certain dashboard could had been done much better, and from there at least some other solutions could have been discussed. Having less chapters with actual examples and having more deeper content on other chapters would create a better result. I missed the wow effect, and the book didn't open completely new horizons for me.

I just got mine in the mail and certainly have not read it, but I've skimmed every page. From a CFO's perspective, love it! Just a couple more observations which one reviewer has already addressed: 1. You don't read this book. I suppose you could. It's a reference book. I'll be hitting several of the chapters that are very pragmatic and relevant to my situation. 2. If you see Andy Cotgreave's name on this book, don't worry about it. Yeah, he's a beast and over the top like his co-authors, but there is something for everyone--novices, beginners, intermediates, and pros. There is something for everyone here. 3. And that leaves me to a new, slightly controversial comment. No criticism aimed at Stephen Few. I own all of his books. But The Big Book of Dashboards is practical. Interested in visualizing your NPS data? No problem. Sales dashboards? Check. I only bring this up because I almost didn't buy the book since I owned all of Few's. There is some overlap, but you will not be disappointed. I only have one gripe while still giving 5 stars. I want sample files. It appears many visuals were completed in Tableau, right? Backup files, Please. That would be great. Otherwise, this book is an easy 5 stars.

I'm embarrassed to think about how many books I've purchased about presenting data and information visually. To be frank, visual storytelling is more important than having the right data. If people can quickly and easily consume the data, you likely have a winner. You'll lose them fast if it is just a bunch of graphs. The Big Book of Dashboards does a great job of showing you how to present data. It also does a great job of showing you how NOT to present the data. Finally, they show you how to combine multiple relevant datasets into one visualization in a very simple and easy-to-consume format. My company is in the business of telling stories with data. This book has and will continue to up our game. Thanks Steve, Jeffrey, and Andy for a great job.

This book really stands out on two dimensions. What I love most is the care that went into assembling so many real world examples. It's easy to proclaim best principles and walk away. Finding examples that convey the lesson is the hard part. This book does that hard thing better than any other. You do not only get the lesson, not just one example, but many examples that paint a rich landscape of possibility. I also like how specific its focus is: business dashboards. Data visualization is now relevant in so many ways that it is easy to get caught up in arenas (e.g. infotainment, journalism, business presentations) that may look similar to dashboards in some instances, but have a very different purpose. I expect that in the future I hope we get even more targeted texts like this. Bravo!

One of the authors, Steve Wexler and I worked together on a project that preceded this book and I was introduced to the wonder that is the scatter graph. Suddenly, our account teams had a powerful tool that could show clients how they compared to peers across similar metrics. Showing clients they fall in the lowest quartile among their peers proved to be a catalyst for productive business conversations and sales. And that's my favorite thing about this book, it is an imminently practical roadmap to getting beyond data in Excel spreadsheets and getting to stimulating conversations that can drive positive changes at work. I'm grateful to Steve and his co-authors for putting great examples into one book. If a picture is worth 1000 words, a revelatory data visualization is worth 5000. Enjoy the book and the conversations that will spring from it!

Despite the title, this book is more about visually presenting individual data sets (perhaps for presentations), rather than identifying and monitoring critical business processes via a "dashboard". An automobile dashboard has achieved a high state of refinement over the last century and is the iconic example of monitoring important parameters in real time. Ideally, a dashboard should: * Monitor a few selected, important parameters (the business key performance indicators [KPI's]), * Compare these parameters to predetermined limits (like red lines or alarm points), and * Display the rate of change in time to permit correction, if necessary (how fast am I speeding up or slowing down?) all in one easily understood display. Out of all the performance data a business should have available, a select few of these should be designated as KPI's that will give a heads up to check in more depth if they depart from norms (e.g., sales calls per week, phone inquiries per day, warranty claims per month, etc.). A business dashboard should consist of those KPI's that are PREDICTIVE of future business activity or quality. So, a business-specific dashboard should be the KPI's identified that will continually assess these few parameters, compare them to established norms, allow interpretation of the information at a glance, and allow enough lead time to intervene before there are adverse consequences. Unfortunately, the book doesn't seem to offer any advice on how to select KPI's for particular types of businesses or how to arrange and present multiple KPI's (i.e., build a car-like dashboard) in such a way as to allow a human to rapidly assess the health of a business. Further, it doesn't even appear to suggest types of software that allow creation of the types of charts and graphs presented in their examples. The book is professionally edited and published on quality stock, but it falls short of the promise implied in the title.

Like everything in life we don't know how good something is until we don't have it anymore. This book is like an ideas book: a pin interest of dashboards with commentary explaining what works, what doesn't and when it doesn't how to improve. When I get lost in the data and don’t know how to present something visually. A flip through this book will give me an "ah-ha!" moment. This should be on the shelf of any data visualisation specialist.

O livro te dá uma visão de Dashboard. Mais não tem um material para você acompanhar os exemplos, e claro aprender também a fazer. Do meu ponto de vista o livro agrega pouco valor. Visão de resultado quem procura um livro de dashboard já possui essa visão, a pessoa não possui a técnica de fazer. Geralmente o que as pessoas querem é aprender a fazer e não a olhar figuras. Do meu ponto de vista para que esse livro fique bom precisa de material como por exemplo, planilhas de Excel para complementar os exemplos do livro.

Reads very well and you can see yourself designing dashboards as you go through it. You can see the thinking, how each dashboard is used in real life, and alternatives. Because the dashboards are real, you learn something about the domain too - from sports to medical offices.

Excelente libro, con ejemplos y paso a paso de como replicarlos

Świetna pozycja dla kogoś, kto chce dowiedzieć się jak budować funkcjonalne dashboardy. Zdecydowanie must have dla każdego UX designera, który nie ma wiedzy na temat wizualizacji danych i myśli, że ładne kolorowe wykresy kołowe to dobry pomysł.