The Big Book of Dashboards

Introduction

We wrote The Big Book of Dashboards for anyone tasked with building or overseeing the development of business dashboards. Over the past decade, countless people have approached us after training sessions, seminars, or consultations, shown us their data, and asked: “What would be a really good way to show this?”

These people faced a specific business predicament (what we call a “scenario”) and wanted guidance on how to best address it with a dashboard. In reviewing dozens of books about data visualization, we were surprised that, while they contained wonderful examples showing why a line chart often works best for time-series data and why a bar chart is almost always better than a pie chart, none of them matched great dashboards with real-world business cases. After pooling our experience and enormous collection of dashboards, we decided to write our own book.

How This Book Is Different

This book is not about the fundamentals of data visualization. That has been done in depth by many amazing authors. We want to focus on proven, real-world examples and why they succeed.

However, if this is your first book about the topic of data visualization, we do provide a primer in Part I with everything you need to know to understand how the charts in the scenarios work. We also dearly hope it whets your appetite for more, which is why this section finishes with our recommended further reading.

How This Book Is Organized

The book is organized into three parts.

• Part I: A Strong ...