I returned to LANDesk in 2014 at the request of the CTO to rebuild the UX team and rebuild trust with developers. One of our first projects (and spoiler alert) was to build a base dashboard. I have built a page about Dashboards; go ahead and check it out. I will wait.
We started by capturing what we thought the key metrics were and sketched out ideas for widgets and graphs that would be relevant to our customers. I don’t have physical representations of the personas we had. We had three of them that ranged from the help desk to the IT manager. (You can see them on the wall in one of the videos I have posted on the public portfolio page).
Once we started playing more with layout, we wanted to understand how the different types of graphs worked. We ran several tests with customers, helping us fine-tune what was communicated at which level.
We based much of our research on Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring by Stephen Few and Edward Tufte’s great series of books. I aspire to one day create something as awesome as the example Edward Tufte uses.
We did find that pie charts and donuts, while they sound tasty, really aren’t the best at relaying details in key areas. We moved them around and tried to focus their use on relaying percentages and ensuring the data was easily accessed to support the chart. We also started experimenting with how much information we could include in one dashboard before it became overwhelming.
