Text: The application of correct text usage will provide a dashboard user experience where quantitative and qualitative information are easily consumable. There are several considerations when inserting text within your dashboard design.

Text Aliasing- When applying text to interactive dashboard applications you may have the choice to use Anti-Aliased text with Flash based applications like Xcelsius. Anti-aliasing is applied to larger fonts, provides smoothly rendered curves and angles . When using small typefaces you always want to use device fonts, which will render the text as Aliased. As you will see in the example below, the aliased text is much easier to read with a smaller font size.

Typeface (Serif vs San-Serif)- In choosing typefaces for dashboards, you will always want to use San-Serif fonts, that is fonts without the serif accents. Arial and Verdana are san-serif fonts, and enable an end user to read text on the computer screen much easier than serif fonts (example: times roman). Serif fonts are best applied in large bodies of printed text for readability. There is no value in using multiple fonts in a dashboard, so pick 1 san-serif font that works well for you.

Font Styles (bold, italics, underline, color)- Font styles provide a means to highlight titles or values that require specific attention. That said, you want to avoid using underlined or italicized fonts as a method to stylize your dashboard. For interactive dashboards, underlined text would represent a URL hyperlink, which has become the standard for web design. If you underline values, the end user will precieve it as clickable. Bold typeface can be used to highlight values but should not be applied to large bodies of text.

Though we have thoroughly covered color as an element of contrast, you will need to choose font colors that provide easy readability. Though black is a popular choice by many dashboard designers, it may eliminate an ability to use black as a highlight color. Assuming the background is light enough, you may want to try using darker shades of gray, and see how much easier it is on the eyes. For large bodies of text in tables or paragraphs, you want to use light background with darker text for easier readability. Using a dark background with light text makes the information a bit harder to visually digest and puts a strain on the end user’s eyes.

This week I wanted to focus on Dashboards, Widgets, and everything else that we put into a bucket called Rich Internet Applications.

There is significant overlap in all three with specific distinctions making each unique. Hopefully I can paint a picture that makes it a little easier to understand.

Consistencies Among all 3
• Generally designed to incorporate an aesthetically pleasing UI.
• Some or most data originates from a server side process or web service.
• Enables some level of configuration or customization
• Implies some type of security model
• Provides a user interface paradigm that is intuitive and simple to navigate
• Resides on the desktop outside of an internet browser which enables a user experience that requires no screen refresh.
• Incorporates Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX or Flash.

Differences

Dashboards:
• Primarily focused on presenting quantitative measures, metrics, and analytics.
• Used to visualize the most recent information available.
• Provide enough information to drive action.
• Is usually embedded or integrated into another application or portal.

Widgets

• Designed to present one or few elements on the screen at one time using minimal screen real estate
• Presents the most important or frequently monitored information or drive common tasks.
• Usually embedded or wrapped around a client side framework.

RIA

• Built to for use as a standalone client application.
• Leverages operating system specific functions in addition to server side communication and data access.

A term that I have always alluded to when instructing users best practices in dashboard design with Xcelsius is getting “lost in visualization,” that is becoming distracted with all of the shiny widgets available and loosing sight of the objectives.

The collective business users of the world are adapted to navigating information through traditional web based (browser) navigation, the same way we are adapted to using a mouse as our human-to-computer interface. The web-page paradigm has become the standard for how business users rate ease of use for navigating through information. Since the purpose of many web sites is to captivate and draw attention, the same way that television commercials do, web pages have incorporated a lot of sex and sizzle to make them more appealing. Many dashboard products like Xcelsius have incorporated similar visual aesthetics making them a marketer’s dream.

In the case of Xcelsius, I believe that it is the selectors (drop down menus, list boxes, radio buttons, etc) that draw customers to the product and not necessarily the charts and gauges (though they are important). Creating a simple, web-like interface for navigating through enterprise data is the goal of all business users. So if Xcelsius provides great components for navigating and viewing enterprise data... where exactly do user's get lost?

• Overcrowding the screen with analysis
• Color choice
• Component sizing
• Layout design and positioning components on the screen
• Incorrect choice of graphs for the given analysis
• Use of selectors to slice data when its not necessary
• Adding unnecessary JPG images

Personally, I am a fan of flat and simple graphics with easy to read, crisp text. In Xcelsius, I always use the halo skin because it uses minimal gradients. Many people are unaware that you can even change the skins (In Xcelsius, click View>Change Skin). I think there is a little room here and there for embossed solid backgrounds to clearly identify a visual break in content, or even using a picture menu for displaying brands that are quickly identified instead of text. At the end of the day, assuming that the designer does not add un-necessary graphics and components, I believe that a dashboard must serve to display content that:

• Is easily digestible
• Requires minimal training for end users
• Is easily navigated with few clicks
• Is presented in a simple and non distracting interface.

I will touch more on this topic of how to design better dashboards with Xcelsius in future posts.