Information Dashboard Design 1st (first) edition Text Only

by Stephen Few

Dashboards have become popular in recent years as uniquely powerful tools for communicating important information at a glance. Although dashboards are potentially powerful, this potential is rarely realized. The greatest display technology in the world won't solve this if you fail to use effective visual design. And if a dashboard fails to tell you precisely what you need to know in an instant, you'll never use it, even if it's filled with cute gauges, meters, and traffic lights. Don't let your investment in dashboard technology go to waste. This book will teach you the visual design skills you need to create dashboards that communicate clearly, rapidly, and compellingly. Information Dashboard Design will explain how Stephen Few has over 20 years of experience as an IT innovator, consultant, and educator. As Principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, Stephen focuses on data visualization for analyzing and communicating quantitative business information. He provides consulting and training services, speaks frequently at conferences, and teaches in the MBA program at the University of California in Berkeley. He is also the author of Show Me the Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten.

Genres: Design, Business, Nonfiction, Reference, Technology, Technical, Programming

Paperback

First published March 5, 2010

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you've taken the time to read Tufte's Envisioning Information then I'm afraid you won't get much additional value from this. The author writes like an intelligent technician, thorough and wooden. The first 188 pages of the book are primarily a catalog of visual principles learned in a first year design class. It's not until the last few pages of the book, after having waded through a swamp of definitions and an exhaustive, exhausting cataloging of chart types, that the author broaches the subject of making your own dashboard. Disappointing. I give points for correctness and thoroughness of this book, but it's neither useful in practice nor engaging from a theoretical subject. The author took an interesting, vital subject and made it boring.

The most valuable chapter was the list of 13 dashboard anti-patterns, which could have just as well been a blog post:


Thirteen Common Mistakes In Dashboard Design
1. Exceeding the boundaries of a single screen
2. Supplying inadequate contest for data
3. Displaying excessive detail or precision
4. Expressing measure indirectly
5. Choosing inappropriate display media
6. Introducing meaningless variety
7. Using poorly designed display media
8. Encoding quantitative data inaccurately
9. Arranging information poorly
10. Highlighting important information ineffectively or not at all
11. Cluttering the display with visual effects
12. Misusing or over-using color
13. Designing an unattractive visual display


I cannot recommend this book to anyone spending their own money. The web contains better resources for making your own dashboards which are more fun, engaging, and interactive than this very dry book.

[Emre Sevinç · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd expect this book's message is already old and tired, and everybody who presented information in various meetings, and created dashboards knew which pitfalls to avoid. Unfortunately, still in 2018, you don't have to look for very bad examples of information visualization. They come at you from every corner in company meetings and Internet sites.

This book, in a very didactic format, distills the theory behind visual perception, cognitive science, and information visualization, and shows the reader what to avoid when creating dashboards and similar information visualization examples. It also presents very nice examples of dashboards, proving that you can indeed show a lot of critical information on a single screen, and in an easily digestible manner.

The reader should be beware though: this book's topic is not scientific visualizations. The dashboards here are intended for management, and therefore they are oriented more towards a strategic style of usage. If you're designing such dashboards, you should always keep in mind that you're designing very practical, easy-to-use decision support tools for high-level decision makers. In other words, echoing the book's message, you should be obsessive to make sure that "every single pixel counts".

[Ben Sweezy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is great. I routinely hand this to people as an introduction to critical thinking about meaningful elements of a graph. In today's language this book is more about graphs than about "visualizations" in that Few's emphasis is clean, readable charts that incorporate elements that fire the right cognitive parts of the brain. Like Tufte, he is a strong advocate for getting out of the way of the data (in Tufte's language, minimizing "data-junk" and maximizing the data-to-ink ratio), but Few also gets specific about selecting colors, shapes, and layouts that allow the brain's visual processing relate the elements in a way that is closest to their fundamental relationship.

Few is particularly interested in ensuring that your graphs are designed for meaningful but very brief glances, as you would want in a "dashboard." Much of his points about design are instructive for executive audiences well beyond the "Dashboard" setting because executive attentions and styles tend to emphasize the brief, pithy message.

[Tom Panning · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're tasked with designing a dashboard that meets Stephen's definition of "dashboard", this book has a lot to offer. To Stephen, "dashboard" means a single-screen UI that is used daily or at least weekly to keep track of the overall state of something. This book covers broad layout and design, but a lot of the value comes from the advice for dashboard elements. There is good advice on when and how to use common elements like bar charts and line charts, along with admonitions to not use pie charts and dials or gauges. Stephen also covers the relatively new sparklines, along with "bullet graphs" which are his replacement for dials/gauges. For each dashboard element, there is a description of the basic usage, and then there are advanced usages to deal with more specific use cases.
The book starts with examples of bad dashboard design (too many for my taste, it felt like he was beating a dead horse), and ends with examples of good dashboard design. There were plenty of examples of good design, but I wouldn't say no to more.
An experienced UX designer would probably be able to figure out a lot of the advice in this book on their own, but reading the book is a much faster way to get to the same destination. It's also nice to be able to refer back to an expert when explaining your design decisions.

[Zhenwei Chan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dashboard design - one of the most important aspect of presentation in this information-overload world today. If you're a consultant or researcher, and you have an encyclopedic amount of analysis you wish to present, do it succintly because most pple tune out after the first 10 mins. That's what a good dashboard should do - it ferrets out the essence of all information neatly in one single screen. the audience get to know what the numbers are and their significance in seconds. But designing such a user friendly dashboard is easier said than done, and many companies (Business Intelligence and Reporting; they pride themselves as) FAIL horribly. what they dont realise is you dont need powerful graphics to present data; those are just eye candies and nothing more. In fact, if you hv microsoft excel idling in ur PC for ages, its time to make the best out of it. the dashboard design techniques can be implemented in excel, so borrow a copy of this book frm the library and add dashboard design as another skillset up ur sleeves!

[Elle Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book actually made me laugh, which, for a textbook, is a huge accomplishment. Lots of visual elements to illustrate principles of design, I truly learned a lot and, as far as textbooks go, it was quite engaging.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Succinct, well written, and insightful. 10 years later there are good dashboarding platforms, so it’s a little dated, but nearly all of it is still equally relevant today.

[Collin Lysford · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, a major caveat - this is for dashboard as a single screen, invariant performance monitoring tool where the stakeholders glance at it frequently and need to be alerted about. Nowadays, dashboards tend to be a lot more about self-service drilldowns, a topic that this book touches on only very briefly. But for design of a single-screen front page, this has a lot of useful and actionable tips.

One sour note is that Few likes to really harp on negative examples. While this is a very useful teaching aid in moderation, he sometimes crosses over the threshold to just running up the score on design patterns like skeuomorphism that we're already well convinced against. But despite this occasionally disrupting the books rhythm, the positive examples are well done and I intend to keep it at work as a desk reference. Read this book if your job is to design dashboards or you want it to be - just be aware that more interactive dashboards, with drilldowns and live criteria filtering, are out of the scope of this book.

[Laurian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just seeing the title of this book I knew that I had to do my due diligence and read it - after all, one of the products that I work on is creating the dashboard on which different little items reside on. The last thing I wanted is for anyone to say "Hey have you read this book about information dashboard designs?" and I didn't have a good response.

I was a bit skeptical. In general I'm not the right audience for most O'Riley books about UX or HCI. Luckily the book ended up being pretty good. The tone was right, the examples were well used, the layout was well designed, and I learned a good amount from it. I event wrote to my team and recommended that they give it a read.

It is Friday, I'm tired, so I won't write more than this.

[Abner Huertas · Rating 5 out of 5]

El diseño es una parte esencial de nuestro trabajo, independiente del tipo de industria para la cual trabajes. Este libro me fue dado en un viaje que realizaba. En mi trabajo necesito presentar información relevante para los tomadores de decisiones, y seamos honestos... muchas veces presentamos gráficos que no comunican nada.

Stephen Few, me enseñó que entregar información que comunique es posible. Lo principal que uno debe de aprender es: simple; así es, la información que más comunica es aquella que tiene un diseño simple sin entrar en mayor desorden creativo.

Si buscas un libro que te ayude a tener técnicas para presentar información ejecutiva por medio de Dashboards, este libro es para ti.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the underlying principles of effective data visual communication are well expressed and remain unchanged, the rest of this book—from 2006—is seriously dated. In this field, no text can go without a complete catalog of chart types, and complaints of why radar graphs are obscure and hard to read; this book is no exception. Advances in design systems and component libraries make many of the tactical recommendations moot. Interesting from an historical perspective, I suppose. Not recommended.

[Meagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading for anyone involved in reporting or dashboard design. This book adresses dashboard content as well as user interface design. He references Edward Tufte as well as some psychology studies about how people read and interpret information. This book is full of tips on what to do and what to avoid. He gives great examples and even picks on the major BI vendors in how they market and present "dashboards". It's a pretty easy and enjoyable read.

[Margie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note: I'm not the best person to review this book. I definitely started with the wrong Stephen Few book. This is the one my library had, but it focuses (as might be expected) quite narrowly on dashboards. What I've seen referred to as dashboards are apparently far from the reality, so I was clearly in the wrong book. I appreciate his ability to discuss visual perception and effective display of data, so I'll read one of his other books and hope to get more out of it.

[Francisco Galán · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book on dashboard design out there (way better than The Big Book of Dashboards). Stephen Few is a master of his craft. I have gone from respecting him to becoming an admirer.

[Aaron Schumacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second edition of Stephen Few's book on making dashboards came out about two weeks ago. I read it, not having read the first edition. In some ways Few is just Tufte for MBAs, but he does have bullet graphs in addition to sparklines, and he focuses on and provides examples of dashboards.

The cover of the second edition is way better than the cover of the first edition because it features a complete example of the style of dashboard that Few advocates. If you understand everything on the cover above, you understand the entire book. It's a really neat sort of meta-visualization. This old cover is rather awful.

The other great thing, distinct to the new edition, is that it features multiple examples of dashboards for teachers, displaying student data. Neat! Mr. Few facilitated a dashboard design competition in 2012, which I had been unaware of. The new edition features the two best submissions, some more examples that weren't as good, and Few's own creation, which I think would look a lot better with different color choice. (You can see a lot of this content on Few's blog, as linked.) The education use case is very interesting to me. I'd like to see the principles of this book applied to, say, NYC's ARIS data system. I wonder how other education data system vendors' products stack up!

I think Stephen Few is fundamentally right about dashboard design. The only thing I would add or discuss further is the primacy of analysis. Said another way, the dashboard should focus on communicating reality, not on communicating metrics. People who think they know what metrics they're interested in are very often wrong. There may be better metrics, or (more likely) it may be that finding a way to present more of the data without reducing it to metrics allows communication of a more complete picture. This could require the use of perhaps more expressive, possibly less conventional means even than sparklines and bullet graphs. But you should certainly know what's in this book.

[Felix · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen Few is an acclaimed authority in the field of data visualization and his works have been sited in most of the books that I’ve referenced in the field. The Information Dashboard Design is my first read from his extensive list of works and I’m glad I made the time to go through it. Even though the title insinuates only coverage of information dashboards as a subject, don’t you dare judge the book by its’ cover.

The book starts off with a definition of a dashboard before smoothly proceeding to expound on different types available. The author then demonstrates how to tap into the powers of visual perception, expounds on the importance of simplicity and discusses common mistakes in dashboard design. Topics on the effective use of dashboard display media, designing for usability and making the viewing experience aesthetically pleasing are all covered in detail. The book closes by putting all the concepts discussed together through a critique of sample dashboards.

Stephen Few has over 30 years of experience in Information Technology as an innovator, teacher and consultant. He has written several books on data visualization, among them: Show me the numbers, Big data- big dupe, Now you see it and Signal. The clients he serves fall in different sectors including; education, government, private sector, health care, technology etc. There is no doubt that he is an authority in the field.

I highly recommend this book to all people who want to visualize data. The book is written for beginners but goes into considerable length to expound on the thinking behind best practices. The fact that the discussion is vendor neutral makes the principles learned applicable to all data visualization tools.

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really glad he included examples of the dashboards he wanted too fix from the early 2000s, because if I just saw the recommended dashboards I wouldn't have really trusted his design choices.

But when I compare what he recommends with what was actually out in the world, I can totally see how he knew what he was talking about.

I think he focused a bit to much on his weird bullet graph and his friend's spark line graphs, they both haven't caught on obviously.

I also didn't like his recommendations of color. The muted Earth tones made everything kind of blurry and hard to parse. But maybe on a computer screen they're be different.

His recommendations on using whitespace to delineate things, avoiding tons of random colors and icons, using appropriate visualizations, avoiding stupid illustrations and graphics, and reducing nose are all totally things I see the value in though.

I especially find the idea that everything should be visible and comprehensible without having to scroll or drill down interesting.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a pretty good overview of the best design principles for dashboards. I was familiar with much of it already, but I found it a thorough review of the practical considerations that make dashboards easier or harder to use. The screenshots are from 2006, so they're pretty hilarious and not exactly representative of what you'd see today, but they still get the point across. The biggest issue I had with the book is that Few very rarely shows side-by-side comparisons; he'll show many bad examples and describe with words what could be done to make them better, but it's hard to understand without seeing the improved version on the page. I also disagree with some of Few's assertions, like the necessity of using an off-white background for dashboards or that his "bullet graphs" are as easy to understand as he thinks they are. Still, I think the book is useful as a whole for anyone whose work involves designing these kinds of dashboards, though it could certainly benefit from an updated edition!

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm sure that when this was first published in 2006, it was some pretty groundbreaking stuff. Unfortunately, I read it in 2020, and the majority of the ideas the author professes have long been implemented as defaults in tools like Tableau. This is not to say that those ideas are trivial, far from it, it's just the "common dashboard mistakes" the author lovingly catalogues aren't all that common anymore. The field of visualization has moved by leaps and bounds since then.

Nevertheless, I don't regret picking up this book. It imposes good, quality order on things you already know, the ideas themselves bear reminding every now and then, if only to keep you on track, and "bullet graphs" in particular (which the author developed on his own) is something I've never seen used before, but which we most certainly could use more in our dashboarding lives.

Overall, not a bad book at all. I knocked down two stars solely because it shows its age.

[Hamish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Don't Make Me Think, this is abook written by a consumate pro.

It's exactly as long as it needs to be, and presents information clearly and logically.

If only more books were written like this.

Some of the key take-aways:
- Never use pie charts. Bar charts are more space-efficient and much clearer.
- Same for radar graphs
- Never use a grouped bar chart. Line charts are much clearer.
- Avoid stacked bar charts. Instead use two line charts: one for total and one for components.
- Maximize the data-ink ratio
- Colour can be a powerful tool to communicate what is important quickly. But only if you use it sparingly.
- Spark charts. Look them up.
- Bullet graphs. Look them up.
- White backgrounds are better than dark backgrounds. Terminals used to be dark, remember? We switched over because white is clearer.

[Matthew Izzo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting bits (e.g. 8-10% of males are colorblind, so design appropriately), but a lot of the book was common sense for anyone who’s worked with Excel and has a basic understanding of graphic design. I did particularly like the chapter about memory and “Gestalt” (pattern) principles of visual perception. It had enough tasty pieces sprinkled throughout to keep me reading, but it was a pretty bland pie all in all. At certain points I found the author’s prose outright incorrigible, largely because he did a poor job hiding his self-righteousness and arrogance regarding his subject matter expertise. Just as a heads up sir, you can be a subject matter expert without coming off as an ass. It did have lots of examples printed in the book, which was useful and made it a relatively quick read. Solid 3 star.

[Daniil Bratchenko · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of best practices, things to do and not to do when building a dashboard.

So far, I was building dashboards using my personal taste and intuition. This is my first book on the topic. It was informative and inspirational, a good source of ideas I did not figure out on my own. The first part of the book was the most useful. It contains general ideas of what dashboards are and what purpose they serve. The idea of dashboard matching the user's mental model and being used to refresh the model at a glance is now stuck with me.

If I ever feel like putting a lot of time into designing a great dashboard, I will definitely return to this book.

[Terran M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I quite like this book for a clear and organized presentation of what makes a good dashboard; I find it superior to Tufte in that the latter gives examples but fails to generalize them into principles that you can actually apply to new designs. Few is my favorite author on the topic of graphical presentation. If dashboards are not relevant to your work, he also has another book, Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis; reading one or the other of them will suffice for most people.

[GGiorgio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Libro che offre molte best practices per il design delle dashboard, spesso basate su principi apparentemente "banali" ma fondamentali (semplicità, chiarezza, organizzazione).
È facile cadere nell'errore di voler inserire troppi dettagli o decorazioni inutili, compromettendo l'efficacia della comunicazione.
Nonostante la qualità dei contenuti, il design del libro stesso non risulta particolarmente accattivante, lasciando un po' delusi rispetto alle aspettative per un'opera che tratta proprio di visual design.

«An effective dashboard is [...] above all else, about communication.»

«How we see is closely tied to how we think.»

[Khuong Ngoc · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book offers very conprehensive and systematic approach to dashbaord design, taken into account how human perception works. It is written in an almost text book like format, and the abundance of photographic examples certain help a lot of the information digestion. A very useful look i to how, above beautiful design, dashboards can be made to present the essential information, with a business context. Unfortunately, in the world we still have too much pf dashboards that are just noisy and not fully thought out. Good read for the data viz newbie like me.

[Kevin Narvaes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a fast and informative read.
Lots of tips and tricks and things to have in mind while we are designing a dashboard. It's tempting to try and make things beautiful just to impress or for the sake of just looking good, however, i's important to have in mind the main goal of a dashboard. To inform in the most precise and summarized way.
It takes practice, but keeping in mind some principles of how human attention and perception work, you'll truthfully design what's most useful for any particular business situation.

[Tech Nossomy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great pictorial reference for anyone interested in dashboard design in the corporate world: the succinct display of data for the reader to draw conclusions and take decisions.
Many examples are provided with their drawbacks, which the author forcefully riles against, but many of the drawbacks pointed out are repeated in yet other examples. And, despite the many examples, not much of the information presented is actually novel.
The book is noteworthy for one particular reason: the author introduces the concept of a bullet graph (yes, the author is american).

[Jacek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Throughout the book, Mr Few many times emphasises the efficiency of visualisation - how important it is to convey a maximum amount of information with simplest graphical means possible. And the book adheres to this principle as well - it's short but densely packed with knowledge, well-structured, providing concrete, actionable advice instead of vague 'best practices' most of the time. A must-read for an analyst or data scientist who needs to present data visualisation to others.

[Jiwon Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a Goodreads recommendation that randomly popped up, but I'm really glad I decided to look it up and read it. It was published in 2006, which is 17 years ago, but SO WELL WRITTEN with concrete examples. Also, the best examples were timeless like a good Audrey Hepburn movie. You want to design something with beauty that doesn't fade away. This is honestly a lovely book and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn data visualization for BI.

[Supriya Raghavendra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good but not the best. A good overview of fundamental ideas that one needs to be mindful of while designing dashboards and rather thorough at that! However, the book falls short given how far dashboards have come since the time the book was written. Perhaps, this book needs revision of examples cited and addition of new chapters to keep it relevant to today's time. :S