The Big Book of Dashboards

Chapter 28 Economy at a Glance

The U.S. economy at a glance.

Dashboard Designers: Sam Fleming, Emily Cadman, Steven Bernard, and Tom Pearson

Organization: Financial Times

Scenario

Big Picture

What are the states of the U.S., U.K., Japanese, and Chinese economies? Within each of those economies, which common economic indicators are rising and which are falling? What are the key takeaways for each? If you want more information, are there some key stories or source data to be looked at?

The economic snapshots from the Financial Times (FT) (a close up is shown in Figure 28.1)

Figure 28.1 Detail from the U.S. economy dashboard.

answer all of those questions for readers, researchers, economists, and journalists. This dashboard is a full snapshot of an economy. The FT has built the dashboards for the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and China.

Specifics

• You run an organization that is arranged into a number of discrete areas, each of which has two or three key metrics to track.
• You need to show actual and forecast values for all areas of a business with many ways of measuring performance.
• You need to add commentary at a macro and micro detail to explain the results.
• You need a dashboard that is mobile responsive.

Related Scenarios

• You need a detailed executive dashboard ...