Designing Dashboards for Websites

The majority of the navigation in any website happens through Dashboard making it very important not only from the perspective of design but also from the perspective of user experience. Dashboards are a combination of visuals and graphs placed together to understand some analytics and visualize key data. Dashboards are an essential part of any web design and designing Dashboards is an essential skillset for a UI/UX designer.

In this article, we will discuss what is a Dashboard. And what is the step-by-step process for designing professional dashboards? We will also discuss the best practices for designing dashboards.

How to Design Dashboards for Websites?

What is a Dashboard?

Data is necessary, but also confusing. The best way to represent data is through visuals and graphs, the dashboard helps you exactly do that. Dashboards are a combination of visuals and graphs placed together to understand some analytics and visualize key data. A Dashboard conveys different but related information in an easy-to-understand manner, the key is to simplify data and present it in the form of charts, graphs, and visuals.

How to Design a Professional Dashboard?

You can follow this 5 step process to design fascinating icons, here I am using a very popular prototyping tool called Figma.

Figma: Figma is a browser based UI and UX creation application with design, prototyping and code generation tools. Figma also comes with its desktop application but firstly, it is known for its browser compatible seamless experience and secondly, the principles behind the desktop app remains the same – it provides the same experience and still uses network connection rather than locally downloading all the tools, basically it remains an online app in both the cases.

Step 1. Researching and data collection: The process of designing a Dashboard starts with researching about the title you wish to create a dashboard from and collect data around it. This can be done during the user research period where the designer takes detailed notes of the research. There’s a lot of information that will be gathered so the designer has to analyze the information, understand the trend, and organize data using tools to identify trends and patterns in that data.

Step 2. Grids: Great Dashboards are made using grids, for designing better icons you should first define your bounding box and a save zone within your bounding box and then set a few key lines. For professional looking Dashboards one must use grid as a template for making the elements of the dashboard proportion uniform.

Step 3. Graphs, Charts and other Visuals: The next step of the design process would be to work on the shape of the icon and get a basic icon ready. By orientation we mean that if the icon appears to be too narrow vertically, rotate it maybe diagonally or in any other orientation.

Step 4. Typography: In this step, we will decide on the typefaces we want to choose and other text characteristics. Typography is a technique in design to create readable, appealing, attractive, and easy-to-eye text for users to read. Typefaces are distinct styles of writing for any font. It includes design for everything every set of characters – from letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, to symbols. There are two Typefaces you must know – Serifs and Sans-Serifs. In the example dashboard, we are using a Sans-Serifs typeface called Poppins.

Step 5. Review and iterate: The final step of the process of designing a dashboard would be to test the final dashboard design. The feedback you receive after that must to taken into account and the design should be iterated accordingly until a final design is obtained that satisfies the usability tests. This is how our final design of the Dashboard looks like:

Best Practices

• Principle of Hierarchy: the goals for every dashboard are going to be different but one of the things which stands out is that there is a lot of information hence it’s really important to create a hierarchy within all the information and all the content. Use design Hierarchy to highlight the most important elements of the dashboard, this will also reduce the cognitive load from the user.
• Originality: Originality is an important aspect when it comes to designing dashboard. Avoid coping the generic elements used in Dashboard and come up with an original design also keeping in mind that those elements are easy to understand for the user and visual represents the data.
• Versatile: The elements of your dashboard must be versatile, by this we mean that it should be able to work with different backgrounds. This helps when you may be changing themes of your application or your website. For creating a versatile icon, you can simply design your icon or set of Icons and test them with in different backgrounds and iterate of the basis of the results.
• Visual Balance: The Elements of Dashboard we design must be is visual balance. By this we mean that the elements of Dashboard we design should follow a visual language and follow the color theory. For this make sure that the colors and the contrast being used should match and complement one another.
• User feedback and iterating: The first iteration of your Dashboard may not be perfect but taking feedback from the users can provide valuable insights about the design and what things should be improved. In order to continuously improve the Dashboard design we have to that user feedback and iterate our design.

Conclusion

Data is necessary, but also confusing. The best way to represent data is through visuals and graphs, dashboard helps you exactly do that. Dashboards are a combination of visuals and graphs placed together to understand some analytics and visualize key data. Dashboards are an essential part of any web design and designing Dashboards is an essential skillset for a UI/UX designer. Make sure to follow the steps and the best practices we discussed in this article when designing your next Dashboard.