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Show Notes
The Big Book of Dashboards (Steve Wexler)
- Amazon USA Store: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119282713?tag=9natree-20
- Amazon Worldwide Store: https://global.buys.trade/The-Big-Book-of-Dashboards-Steve-Wexler.html
- Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/big-book-of-dashboards-the-visualizing-your-data/id1811444890?itsct=books_box_link&itscg=30200&ls=1&at=1001l3bAw&ct=9natree
- eBay: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=The+Big+Book+of+Dashboards+Steve+Wexler+&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&siteid=0&campid=5339060787&customid=9natree&toolid=10001&mkevt=1
- Read more: https://english.9natree.com/read/1119282713/
#dashboarddesign #datavisualization #businessintelligence #KPIreporting #Tableaudashboards #visualanalytics #informationhierarchy #TheBigBookofDashboards
These are takeaways from this book.
Firstly, Designing dashboards around questions, not charts, A central theme of the book is that a dashboard should start with the decisions it must support. Instead of asking what charts can be built from available fields, the book encourages readers to define the audience, the goals, and the key questions that must be answered quickly. This leads to more purposeful content: the right metrics, the right level of detail, and the right comparisons. In real organizations, stakeholders often want everything on one page, but the book emphasizes prioritization and narrative hierarchy so that the most important signals are seen first. It also highlights the difference between monitoring and analysis. Monitoring dashboards typically focus on status, trends, and exceptions, while analytical views allow deeper exploration and explanation. By grounding design in use cases, readers learn to choose visuals that match tasks such as ranking, tracking change over time, finding outliers, or assessing progress to goal. The approach helps avoid a common trap where dashboards become collections of unrelated visuals that do not answer a coherent set of questions. The result is a clearer, more actionable information product that aligns with business workflows and decision cadence.
Secondly, Choosing effective visual forms for common business comparisons, The book is known for mapping familiar business scenarios to visualization choices that support fast and accurate interpretation. It teaches readers to match chart types to the comparison being made, such as time series, part to whole, distribution, correlation, or ranking. Emphasis is placed on clarity and perceptual effectiveness, favoring designs that make comparisons easy, such as bars and lines, and treating more decorative options with caution. Readers are guided to reduce cognitive load by avoiding unnecessary 3D effects, excessive color palettes, and overloaded axes. Another valuable takeaway is the focus on context: showing targets, baselines, previous periods, or benchmarks so that a metric has meaning. The book also addresses when to use small multiples, sparklines, or highlight tables to reveal patterns across many categories without turning the dashboard into a cluttered wall of charts. In addition, it encourages consistency in visual grammar so users do not have to relearn how to read each tile. By linking visual choices to business questions, readers build a repeatable method for selecting visuals that communicate quickly and reduce misinterpretation.
Thirdly, Layout, information hierarchy, and the art of scannability, Even strong charts can fail when the page is hard to scan. The book devotes significant attention to dashboard composition, explaining how layout decisions influence comprehension. Readers learn to create a clear information hierarchy, typically placing the most important KPIs and summaries where the eye naturally starts, then supporting details and breakdowns in a logical flow. It stresses alignment, spacing, and grouping so the dashboard reads as an organized system rather than a collage. The concept of scannability is central: users should be able to grasp overall status in seconds, then drill into specifics without hunting. This includes using consistent typography, restrained color, and purposeful annotations. The book also discusses the role of white space, which is often treated as wasted real estate, but is framed as a tool for separation and emphasis. Another theme is avoiding the temptation to fill every pixel with data. Instead, the design should balance density with readability and ensure that each element earns its place. These principles help teams produce dashboards that work in meetings, in self service contexts, and on different screen sizes, while maintaining clarity under real operational time pressure.
Fourthly, Using color, labels, and interactivity with discipline, Dashboards frequently suffer from overuse of color and overreliance on interactivity that hides essential information. The book promotes a disciplined approach: color should carry meaning, not decoration. Readers are encouraged to adopt limited palettes, use neutral tones for context, and reserve strong colors for highlights such as exceptions, thresholds, or selected items. It also emphasizes accessibility considerations, including the risk of confusing color combinations and the need to ensure that meaning is not encoded by color alone. Labeling and formatting are treated as core communication tools. Clear titles, units, and timeframes prevent misreadings, while precise number formatting avoids false precision. Interactivity is framed as valuable when it supports real tasks, such as filtering to a segment, revealing details on demand, or switching between views, but it should not force users to click repeatedly to understand basic status. The book advocates making the default view informative, then using interaction to explore nuances. By applying these principles, readers can create dashboards that remain understandable when printed, projected, or viewed quickly, and that reduce the risk of stakeholders drawing the wrong conclusions from ambiguous encodings.
Lastly, Iterating with stakeholders and establishing dashboard standards, A practical dashboard is rarely perfect on the first draft, and the book highlights the importance of iteration. It encourages readers to treat dashboard building as a collaborative process that includes gathering requirements, presenting prototypes, and refining based on feedback and observed usage. Stakeholders often disagree on what matters, so the book implicitly supports facilitation: clarifying definitions, aligning on KPI logic, and confirming what actions will follow from the numbers. It also points toward the value of standardization, especially in organizations with many dashboards. Consistent metric definitions, naming conventions, and visual patterns reduce confusion and speed adoption. Readers learn to think beyond a single deliverable and consider maintainability: how easily the dashboard can be updated, how filters and segments should behave, and how to prevent metric drift across departments. The book’s scenario driven structure helps teams recognize recurring patterns and reuse solutions rather than reinventing layouts each time. Over time, this approach can mature into a visualization style guide or governance process. The payoff is greater trust, faster decision making, and dashboards that stay useful as data sources, business priorities, and audiences evolve.
- Amazon USA Store: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119282713?tag=9natree-20
- Amazon Worldwide Store: https://global.buys.trade/The-Big-Book-of-Dashboards-Steve-Wexler.html
- Apple Books: https://books.apple.com/us/audiobook/big-book-of-dashboards-the-visualizing-your-data/id1811444890?itsct=books_box_link&itscg=30200&ls=1&at=1001l3bAw&ct=9natree
- eBay: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=The+Big+Book+of+Dashboards+Steve+Wexler+&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&siteid=0&campid=5339060787&customid=9natree&toolid=10001&mkevt=1
- Read more: https://english.9natree.com/read/1119282713/
#dashboarddesign #datavisualization #businessintelligence #KPIreporting #Tableaudashboards #visualanalytics #informationhierarchy #TheBigBookofDashboards
These are takeaways from this book.
Firstly, Designing dashboards around questions, not charts, A central theme of the book is that a dashboard should start with the decisions it must support. Instead of asking what charts can be built from available fields, the book encourages readers to define the audience, the goals, and the key questions that must be answered quickly. This leads to more purposeful content: the right metrics, the right level of detail, and the right comparisons. In real organizations, stakeholders often want everything on one page, but the book emphasizes prioritization and narrative hierarchy so that the most important signals are seen first. It also highlights the difference between monitoring and analysis. Monitoring dashboards typically focus on status, trends, and exceptions, while analytical views allow deeper exploration and explanation. By grounding design in use cases, readers learn to choose visuals that match tasks such as ranking, tracking change over time, finding outliers, or assessing progress to goal. The approach helps avoid a common trap where dashboards become collections of unrelated visuals that do not answer a coherent set of questions. The result is a clearer, more actionable information product that aligns with business workflows and decision cadence.
Secondly, Choosing effective visual forms for common business comparisons, The book is known for mapping familiar business scenarios to visualization choices that support fast and accurate interpretation. It teaches readers to match chart types to the comparison being made, such as time series, part to whole, distribution, correlation, or ranking. Emphasis is placed on clarity and perceptual effectiveness, favoring designs that make comparisons easy, such as bars and lines, and treating more decorative options with caution. Readers are guided to reduce cognitive load by avoiding unnecessary 3D effects, excessive color palettes, and overloaded axes. Another valuable takeaway is the focus on context: showing targets, baselines, previous periods, or benchmarks so that a metric has meaning. The book also addresses when to use small multiples, sparklines, or highlight tables to reveal patterns across many categories without turning the dashboard into a cluttered wall of charts. In addition, it encourages consistency in visual grammar so users do not have to relearn how to read each tile. By linking visual choices to business questions, readers build a repeatable method for selecting visuals that communicate quickly and reduce misinterpretation.
Thirdly, Layout, information hierarchy, and the art of scannability, Even strong charts can fail when the page is hard to scan. The book devotes significant attention to dashboard composition, explaining how layout decisions influence comprehension. Readers learn to create a clear information hierarchy, typically placing the most important KPIs and summaries where the eye naturally starts, then supporting details and breakdowns in a logical flow. It stresses alignment, spacing, and grouping so the dashboard reads as an organized system rather than a collage. The concept of scannability is central: users should be able to grasp overall status in seconds, then drill into specifics without hunting. This includes using consistent typography, restrained color, and purposeful annotations. The book also discusses the role of white space, which is often treated as wasted real estate, but is framed as a tool for separation and emphasis. Another theme is avoiding the temptation to fill every pixel with data. Instead, the design should balance density with readability and ensure that each element earns its place. These principles help teams produce dashboards that work in meetings, in self service contexts, and on different screen sizes, while maintaining clarity under real operational time pressure.
Fourthly, Using color, labels, and interactivity with discipline, Dashboards frequently suffer from overuse of color and overreliance on interactivity that hides essential information. The book promotes a disciplined approach: color should carry meaning, not decoration. Readers are encouraged to adopt limited palettes, use neutral tones for context, and reserve strong colors for highlights such as exceptions, thresholds, or selected items. It also emphasizes accessibility considerations, including the risk of confusing color combinations and the need to ensure that meaning is not encoded by color alone. Labeling and formatting are treated as core communication tools. Clear titles, units, and timeframes prevent misreadings, while precise number formatting avoids false precision. Interactivity is framed as valuable when it supports real tasks, such as filtering to a segment, revealing details on demand, or switching between views, but it should not force users to click repeatedly to understand basic status. The book advocates making the default view informative, then using interaction to explore nuances. By applying these principles, readers can create dashboards that remain understandable when printed, projected, or viewed quickly, and that reduce the risk of stakeholders drawing the wrong conclusions from ambiguous encodings.
Lastly, Iterating with stakeholders and establishing dashboard standards, A practical dashboard is rarely perfect on the first draft, and the book highlights the importance of iteration. It encourages readers to treat dashboard building as a collaborative process that includes gathering requirements, presenting prototypes, and refining based on feedback and observed usage. Stakeholders often disagree on what matters, so the book implicitly supports facilitation: clarifying definitions, aligning on KPI logic, and confirming what actions will follow from the numbers. It also points toward the value of standardization, especially in organizations with many dashboards. Consistent metric definitions, naming conventions, and visual patterns reduce confusion and speed adoption. Readers learn to think beyond a single deliverable and consider maintainability: how easily the dashboard can be updated, how filters and segments should behave, and how to prevent metric drift across departments. The book’s scenario driven structure helps teams recognize recurring patterns and reuse solutions rather than reinventing layouts each time. Over time, this approach can mature into a visualization style guide or governance process. The payoff is greater trust, faster decision making, and dashboards that stay useful as data sources, business priorities, and audiences evolve.
