Dashboard Development Canvas - A Step-by-Step Guide
This article on the Dashboard Development Canvas is a collaboration with Dennis Teekamp Gout (VisionBI).
Creating an effective Power BI dashboard isn’t as simple as dragging and dropping data onto a screen. Developing a dashboard that the end user will find valuable requires significant effort. Many Business Intelligence (BI) developers struggle due to the lack of information provided despite the critical nature of the end product. Vague instructions, such as “Just create a dashboard with our sales data and do it quickly,” fail to provide clarity.
Several factors can affect the end-user experience and the adoption rates of a report. Besides ensuring data quality and clear definitions, understanding your audience, defining the report’s purpose, conveying a clear key message, determining the necessary level of detail, addressing specific questions, and presenting data in actionable visualizations are all crucial elements. Quite a list.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the many aspects of dashboard design. However, you can approach this in a structured way! That’s where my Dashboard Development Canvas comes in. This simple yet powerful tool helps you break down the dashboard creation process into clear steps, ensuring that all essential elements are addressed and organized.
The Dashboard Development Canvas
Over the past few years, I developed a dashboard development canvas. The concept is straightforward: I outline every crucial detail I require from the end-user before I start creating the dashboard. This canvas becomes my roadmap during development, ensuring an organized workflow.
Advantages:
- Step-by-step information gathering
- Structured process
- Instant insight into missing elements
- Serves as documentation
Building Blocks of the Dashboard Development Canvas
There are 8 sections in the canvas, covering topic definition to evaluation, each with guiding questions.
1) The topic
It might seem obvious, but many people treat dashboard design as just “data visualization.” The real question is: what are you visualizing? The subject of the dashboard should align with its core message and goals. If you’re unsure about the subject, focusing on the core message and the objectives you want the dashboard to achieve can help bring clarity.
2) The goal
The purpose drives the design of a dashboard. Without a specific goal, creating a report risks becoming one that serves everyone but is used by no one. Understanding what the end-user aims to achieve, the actions they can take with the insights provided, and how to visually represent this information is crucial. Which particular questions are addressed?
3) The audience
Who is the end-user, an individual or a larger group? How much experience do they have (crucial for design), and how is the dashboard used? Often, the manager asking for a report is not the direct end-user. Therefore, it is essential to determine who the dashboard is for and to engage directly with the actual users.
4) Current State
Are we talking about a new or existing dashboard? Assessing the current user experience is beneficial for an existing dashboard.
Which questions have we already answered, and which ones remain? What feedback have we gathered from end-users? Furthermore, it is essential to explore how incorporating new information can enhance the existing dashboard.
5) Key Message
The core message should align with the subject and purpose of the dashboard. It should capture the context, information, and actions that users can take with the dashboard.
Example: “As a Management Team (context), we evaluate monthly (context) the KPIs (information) and the performance of both top-performing and bottom-performing products (information) per country (context). Based on this evaluation, we then determine which products to modify (action).”
6) Level of Detail
You typically don’t need to provide every detail at the finest level. It’s crucial to evaluate the necessary level of detail carefully. Presenting too many filtering and drill-through options can confuse the end user, compromising the overall user experience.
7) Visualization
Which visualizations could address the questions? Often, the developer and the end-user already have ideas about how to visualize the data. While these thoughts aren’t set in stone, they offer helpful guidance for the design journey.
8) Test & Evaluation
Just as crucial as determining the goal and the key message is defining who will test and evaluate the dashboard. It’s essential to establish what will be tested and who ultimately decides if it meets the requirements. Documenting agreements and responsibilities helps prevent endless improvement suggestions and redevelopment, which can result in reinventing the wheel repeatedly.
The Dashboard Development Canvas can't address every issue: Changing the workflow.
It’s crucial to remember that, in the end, the dashboard must be implemented and used, which may require adjustments to existing processes. This could mean incorporating the use of the dashboard each morning to monitor specific processes or to support decision-making. It’s beneficial to highlight the advantages, for example, “Utilizing this dashboard enables us to work more efficiently and gain insights more quickly.”
Time is already a constraint for us.
A dashboard development canvas provides numerous benefits, including a clearer understanding of the project scope, well-documented processes, and transparent agreements. While many BI developers are enthusiastic about this approach, doubts also exist. Often, the business side argues that there is no time to provide explanations or deems allocating extra hours to invest in working on a dashboard development canvas unnecessary. Therefore, it’s crucial to sell this concept effectively.
Would you like to learn more about getting to know the end user and telling a story in your report? Please take a look at my storytelling and data article.