Data visualization challenge: my dashboard design

Finally we get to the choices I made for my dashboard entry into Chandoo's data visualization challenge. The challenge already directed us to make the dashboard focused on the two year performance of the sales people. I'll break this post into the five or so parts of the (single screen) dashboard.

Easily overlooked, but vital, is the title of the dashboard - what is it, what time period does the data cover? Under the title is the most expensive part of the screen real estate - the primary information must go here. If I'm a senior manager looking for sales person information, my first questions will always be: who sold the most, how did those sales vary over my chosen time period, how much was sold compared to what was expected?

From this display we see immediately who sold the most and the least  - give the dollar values, they will be needed - the bar chart gives us information about each person's contribution to the sum. The red markers warn of poor sales performance. The sparklines provide us with time trending information, so often missed from data displays. For data that has some sort of periodicity (as sales data tends to), it can be useful to provide a moving average that better reveals overall trends - for example, the moving average is better at showing that everyone experiences a drop in sales part way through the period, but Hansolo's drop was much more abrupt than James Kirk's.

The Budget/Actual shows that only Hansolo met budget, presumably due to the recovery he experienced in the last six months. By not scaling the bars to be all 100%, we provide additional information about what the sales targets were per sales person. As this makes it difficult to compare sales to target across the sales force, the variance to budget bars clarify this.

The sparklines in the top section are scaled differently to each other - otherwise trends are hidden for the sales people with lower revenue. However it would be easy to predict that the user of the dashboard would want to see the information on one chart. The chart provides this, and an in an effort to minimize colors I added a drop down box to highlight one person compared to the other three. When the manager asks "Why was Hans Solo's performance better than the others?" this chart helps answer that.

I feel that the headlines section is an often overlooked part of a dashboard- 3D pie charts and revving speedometers are sexy, words are not. Often though, pithy statements can make a dashboard much more useful and in 20 seconds can provide you with the most important take-home messages. They are especially great in dynamic dashboards, as long as the information regularly changes.

Finally we begin to get to the other measures that perhaps (hopefully) help us understand the sales issues. The coloration on the data table (again, it is important to sometimes show values) helps us understand the areas that sales people sold in - James Kirk sold almost exclusively in the south, Luke sold across the country. The map provides this information in a slightly different way - for a given region, who sold the most?

The map also provides information about the states that are in each region - anyway that you can make a dashboard as rich as possible is great, but notice that as this is not the most important information, the region boundaries are just a thicker gray, not a highly colored boundary that detracts from the bars.

The bottom two displays are formatted in the same way, so here is just the company size visualization. The stacked bar shows the proportion of sales to each size company - Chewbacca sells to all sizes, Luke is much more focused on enterprise sales. The bars underneath show for a particular size company, how are the sales distributed - again, important, because even though Chewabacca sells to enterprise, his overall contribution to the sales for that size company is completely minimal. That's it - thank you again Chandoo, for the opportunity to create this dashboard.

If by some amazing chance you've made it all the way through this post and are still reading, I'd like to remind you that Data Driven Consulting can help your organization create actionable, strategic, highly useful dashboards and reports that will make your business more successful.