week 4: Exploring Dashboards

 This week in our discussion we focused on dashboards and how they play an important role in an effective infographic presentation. A dashboard can be defined as "a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives"(Stephen Few). A well rounded dashboard consist of three major components being strategic, operational, and analytical. In this case, strategic refers to having a quick overview of high level measures of performance like good and bad performance evaluations. Operational in this setting refers to information that is used for monitoring operations such as sales information. Lastly, analytical refers to additional content that is highly interactive such as pictures, graph, or charts. 

Source: https://www.datapine.com/dashboard-examples-and-templates/retail

In the display above, we are able to see an example of a sales dashboard potentially used in a retail sales setting. The dashboard includes things like graphs, charts, pictures, and most importantly, the important information (data). This example also outlines the three major components of a dashboard being strategic by identifying important information and giving a quick overview of everything the viewer needs to know. Additionally, the dashboard gives the operational aspect by including relevant information for the store or company such as highlighting where higher traffic in sales are coming from (men, women, children, location, etc..). Lastly, as stated before, the dashboard includes pictures, graphs, and charts which help the viewer stay interactive with what they are learning. 

One of the biggest take aways from this video was you do not wanna do too much or too little. when it comes time to making a dashboard or an infogrpahic in general, you want to aim for the sweet spot with both information as well as visualizations. By not having enough visualization, some viewers may loose focus and not take out of it what was actually important. Doing too much can also lead to the same effect being that the viewer was distracted and now doesn't really know what was addressed.