Calling Attention to your Dashboard

[Former Member]

As Dashboard developers, our sole aim is to create a product which enables the users to identify trends, outliers and exceptions. Often, extravagant dashboard design with the whole hullaballoo of charts and fancy components overshadow critical data points and valuable information. After researching through several ideas, we finally came up with the Blinking Alerts concept.

Our challenge was to make sure the commonly overlooked components/data such as,

• Refresh or submit button to activate changes,
• Connection refresh button,
• Minute changes in alerts that need to be noted,
• Very small areas in maps or a small column chart, to stand out.

The human eye tends to catch little deviations in a somewhat static environment easily, so these blinking alerts draw attention to detail.

For example, take the following P&L simulator dashboard, which enables users to perform elaborate what-if analysis and evaluate the impact of changes in projected sales growth and % of sales on the proforma income statement.

Here, a blinking alert is enabled when present year’s net revenue becomes less than that of last year’s. Blinking alert draws attention towards this critical information and ensures that it’s not missed. These small enhancements will ensure that you ultimately achieve the aim of the dashboard.

For the How to Document refer: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-61124

Source: http://visualbi.com/blogs/dashboards/dashboard-with-blinking-alerts/