Stephen Few's Information Dashboard Design is the latest in a series of books I've been reading about visual design and the display of quantitative information. It's a surprisingly heavy book for being relatively skinny (~200 pp), but is printed on gorgeous high-quality paper. This O'Reilly book feels much more like a coffee-table book than the usual animal-cover books for which they are famous.
Dashboards are one of those phrases that the synergy-loving, tassle-loafer, khaki-loving business-types really like. I was worried at first that this book would be targeted more toward the executive officer crowd and less about helping designers. The first two chapters didn't ease my concerns with lots of discussion around designing for executive goals and summaries. However once we got past the introductory chapters, the book really picks up...
Chapter 3: Common Mistakes
This chapter highlights a litany of common dashboard design mistakes. These aren't just limited to visual tips, but also includes important concepts like providing context through comparison and scaling displayed data appropriately. The examples given here are fairly egregious examples of bad dashboard design, but acclimate the reader to critical review.
Chapter 4: Tapping Into The Power of Visual Perception
This is where the fun begins as you learn some of the science behind visual perception. Few describes how shape, position, color, hue and encapsulating marks all affect how we process and perceive data visually. This is one of three chapters that a designer will return to again and again for review.
Chapter 5: Eloquence Through Simplicity
Here we head to a particularly Tufte-ian territory with the consistent refrains of "maximizing data ink" and "removing non-data marks". While the words make sense, the concepts are driven home with some great examples. My favorite part of this chapter was the rectangle depicting which screen regions get the most attention and why. After you see it, it's obvious and yet you'll easily be able to recall many examples you've seen that violate these principles.
Chapter 6: Effective Dashboard Display Media
The party continues with a detailed survey of the most common graphical visual idioms. The common chart styles like line plots, bar graphs and scatter plots are explored as well as the more exotic ones such as radar graphs, stem-plots and even strategic icon placement. This chapter serves as a great foundation for the final chapters where you will use your newly-acquired visual vocabulary to perform a detailed critique of a number of sample dashboards. Oh and if you take nothing else from this book, remember this: pie-charts are useless.
Chapter 7: Designing for Usability
This is the shortest chapter of the book, but the two great takeaways from this chapter are encouraging useful comparisons and avoiding senseless ones. If unrelated data-sets are placed too closely or use the same visual representation, it may encourage meaning comparison. Conversely using different styles for data that should be compared simply makes the user's job harder.
Few dives into a few tips around making an esthetically pleasing dashboard without resorting to decorative gew-gaws that clutter the display. In particular things such as using a muted color palette, designing for high resolution and picking the right fonts (a particular sticking point for me) are all ways to be informative without distracting the user.
Chapter 8: Putting It All Together
This is easily the best part of the book. However I wouldn't suggest skipping the other chapters in a effort to get to the payoff. I think the reader would best be served by reading this book in sequential order because the principles and concepts covered in the earlier chapters help to give the reader a visual vocabulary for what comes in this chapter.
The begins by showing a dashboard the author designed designed for a competition designing dashboards for a mock business. The dashboard is concise, dense without being cluttered and draws focus to important items quickly. In contrast the author shows eight other dashboards that contestants submitted for the same mock business. Each one has a number of defects, some easy to find and others less so. It's definitely worth studying these dashboards with a careful eye prior to reading the author's criticism.
The chapter ends with three more dashboards targeted to other audiences: the CIO, tele-sales and marketing. Each shows off the other motifs highlighted in earlier chapters. However they all have a consistent style--one that is clear, concise, dense but uncluttered. The prospective designer would be well-advised to spend some quality time studying these examples to distill them into principles for their own designs. This chapter really caps the book off well.
Finally...
Information Dashboard Design is a well-written book full of useful information. The high-level principles are well-described and the catalog of details motifs make this book worth having.
4 out of 5 stars.