Usability, ease of navigation and the overall user experience are all very important in analytics dashboard design—but equally important is understanding what the end user’s objectives are when he or she uses an analytics dashboard or a user interface—because if you don’t know what they want to get out of the analytics, you risk losing the user.
A good entry point for beginners is to use tools like Google Analytics Help which illustrates and explains the practices and the steps for designing analytics dashboards with widgets, charts, geographical shapes and data. These best practices illustrate how to construct a dashboard or a user interface that is static and not interactive.
One key to designing dashboards is keeping them simple and even unobtrusive. Simplicity of design is often captured by displaying only the top-level information that the user wants to know, and then giving them navigational tools that enable deeper probes if they want them.
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