Impactful BI dashboards follow these design principles

Businesses lose an annual average of $12.9 million (per company) due to poor data quality and ineffective reporting. The reality is that a dashboard that fails to communicate the right metrics to the right audience undermines trust, delays decisions and wastes opportunities. Effective BI dashboard design, on the other hand, offers the clarity required to make smarter decisions and drive meaningful impact.

Why dashboard design matters in BI

BI dashboards are decision-making tools that help users focus on the most relevant insights quickly instead of having to sift through comprehensive reports to find what they need.

Your dashboard isn't intended to answer all questions. Like a control panel on a car, it's supposed to alert you if something is out of the norm and requires fixing or deeper investigation. A dashboard also hones in on the data you need to make decisions and assess progress.

A poorly designed dashboard is like a cluttered storefront. Users can’t find what they need and walk away confused. In business, this confusion wastes time and leads to bad and costly decisions. 

Effective dashboard design supports wise decisions and keeps everyone on the same page, which is essential for business success. Forrester Research found that companies with clear alignment between marketing, digital and customer experience teams grow revenue 1.6 times faster than their peers. Clear and timely information sharing between these teams is critical, and this clarity relies on relevant data presented simply.

One of the key ideas of BI dashboards is that they should quickly answer questions like:

• Is everything running smoothly?
• Is there a problem that needs fixing?
• Is there a win worth celebrating?

Everything else can often be seen as unnecessary noise that distracts from these primary goals. 

Good dashboards make complex data easy to understand and actionable for everyone, not just data analysts. They improve communication between technical and non-technical teams by presenting insights in straightforward terms. 

This clarity reduces delays, eliminates misunderstandings and lets teams focus on decisions instead of deciphering reports.

What types of data dashboards are there?

You might feel like you need to get as much information into one central dashboard as possible. But when when part of the goal is to make it easy to analyze data quickly, less is often more. You can keep your dashboard layout clean and easy-to-digest by focusing on specific types of insights.

• Status monitoring dashboards provide a real-time view of business performance and help leaders spot trends or issues. For example, an e-commerce sales dashboard might track daily revenue, order volume and customer traffic to highlight potential slowdowns or spikes.
• Entity dashboards focus on specific teams or departments and track key performance indicators. A marketing team dashboard could display campaign performance, lead generation and social media engagement for a clear view of success.
• Area dashboards dive into specialized areas like SEO, paid media or customer engagement. A SEO dashboard might show keyword rankings, organic traffic and backlink growth to measure search performance.
• Role-specific dashboards are designed for executives like the CEO, CMO or CFO and highlight insights like CAC and CLV. A CMO dashboard could include marketing efficiency ratios (MER), brand sentiment and customer acquisition costs to guide strategic decisions.

Good design simplifies data analysis across the board

Being able to visualize data from multiple dashboards can make CMO-CFO collaboration more strategic, making justifying your marketing budget every quarter a thing of the past.

For IT teams, it means integrated data from multiple systems in unified views to manage systems performance at a glance.

For finance teams, it means more accurate forecasting, quicker decisions and a better view of how marketing efficiency and effectiveness are being balanced.

For agencies and consultants, it means compelling client dashboards that share results automatically and provide context for performance, helping to cut down on meetings.

7 key principles for effective BI dashboards

A business intelligence dashboard aims to facilitate quick, data-informed decision-making based on trust in the metrics presented.

Think about the last dashboard or BI report you were shown (or even created yourself). When looking at it, could you tell within 5 seconds if everything was okay or not? This is the critical question to keep in the back of your mind as we dig into the seven things you need to create effective BI dashboards:

1. Data quality

Before you can start exporting your metrics into dashboards, you need to be sure you can rely on the data.

Gartner’s recent data quality report lays out four factors required to ensure the data used in your BI dashboards is reliable, insightful and actionable.

• Accessibility: Raw data must be easily accessible. Is it being fed into a central data hub where you can standardize it and easily export what you need to your BI tool?
• Timeliness: Data must be up-to-date to support real-time decisions. Does your data feed in automatically via seamless integrations with your advertising platforms?
• Relevance: Data should align with business questions. Do your metrics align with what your audience most needs to understand?
• Accuracy: Data must be as accurate as possible to avoid misleading insights.

2. Clarity

With the right underlying data forming the foundation of your dashboards, you can move onto the next principle: clarity. Ensuring your BI dashboards are clear involves understanding what to present and how to present your information to generate the biggest impact:

• Use consistent, simple visuals relevant to the data you’re showing (e.g., bar charts or line graphs for trends).
• Consider the job to be done as each chart type has a specific function. If you want to show patterns of change, a standard line chart is great. If you want to compare individual periods, a bar chart is more suitable. 
• Generally speaking, it's best to choose common chart types that everyone can understand.
• Avoid clutter by focusing on the most important metrics and KPIs.

Here’s an example of a business intelligence dashboard that’s hard to read because it lacks clarity. The layout is crowded with a variety of graphs and metrics, making it difficult to draw conclusions quickly.

Instead, you want to create something like this: 

Imagine you’re creating a dashboard for a sales team manager who needs to see their team’s key stats at a glance. You need a simple-to-read dashboard that puts key metrics front and center. In five seconds your sales manager should be able to see where there are issues:

While this could still be improved with a lighter background and easier-to-read text, a sales manager can see at a glance who is on target, who is on track with their call volume, the number of outstanding tasks remaining and upcoming leave requests.

Pro tip: To take this to the next level, you could also add sales targets to provide wider context and add traffic light indicators to show good, on-track and poor performance.

3. Hierarchy

To save the audience time, prioritize information by importance using size, position or color emphasis. Make sure the most critical data is immediately visible at the top of the dashboard.

Let’s break down this dashboard: 

• The metrics across the top are the most essential. A seasoned performance marketer could see these metrics at a glance and know whether they are on track or if adjustments need to be made
• The funnel represents the customer journey at a glance, however this could be further improved by making the percentages larger. 
• CMOs tend to work within benchmark percentages, so the volume of conversions or new users might not be as simple to action as the percentage of the conversion rate from clicks to new users (also critical for CFO and CEO dashboards in terms of how revenue uplift is being impacted by marketing efforts).
• Adding the target or average CPM, CPC and cost per lead to aim for would make this even clearer by adding context.
• You could also show sparklines to show how things are trending over time, or flag numbers that fall outside of the accepted ranges. 
• Because this dashboard has been specifically created for one role, it doesn't provide a huge amount of context on what's good, bad or okay, which could cause some confusion.

Pro tip: Avoid just showing numbers and assuming the person looking at it knows the background context.

The level of simplicity in this dashboard layout allows a performance marketer to take in the most critical data in five seconds and take action as needed. Additional context would make this accessible for CMOs. 

4. Actionability

BI dashboards exist as a tool for better decision-making, meaning they must be impactful enough to inform and inspire action. To that end, consider these dashboard design best practices:

• Highlight insights with annotations or alerts to draw attention to key trends, anomalies or metrics requiring action.
• Include filters, drill-down options and dynamic views to allow users to explore data and uncover deeper insights relevant to their roles.
• Get comfortable with focus mode, which allows your audience to access specific metrics as needed without having to isolate data among a sea of metrics.

Let’s look at another example: 

Having the labels right next to each line makes the information easier to understand. Additionally, it’s important to consider the filters on dashboards. If a filter applies only to a specific graph and not to all the data, it can lead to misleading interpretations. 

Simplify decision-making by prioritizing actionable metrics over excessive data to ensure users can quickly grasp what needs their attention.

Use real-time notifications for critical thresholds or changes to keep users informed and proactive.

Actionability turns dashboards from static reports into tools for decision-making and problem-solving.

5. Consistency

Keep things uniform so the eye knows where to go to find information:

• Maintain uniform design elements such as fonts, colors and layouts across all metrics and graphs.
• Use standardized naming conventions and labels to prevent confusion and help with clarity.
• Align charts, tables and visuals with a cohesive style to create a seamless user experience.
• Establish design guidelines and templates to ensure all dashboards follow the same structure and logic.
• Consistency helps users navigate data dashboards more easily, fosters trust in the insights and makes sure you are creating a professional presentation.
• Don’t go overboard with colors — choose a simple and easy-to-read palette. 

Here’s an example of a BI dashboard that can confuse the user because of a lack of consistency:

• At first glance, you might think this looks good. However, when we come back to the five-second rule, the high hue is distracting and the stacked bar graph is hard to decipher.
• To make this graph effective, it should focus on the key metrics only and keep to a consistent structure so the audience knows exactly where to find what they need, quickly.

Try something like this instead: 

While you might secretly miss the edgy look of neon colors and different data visualizations, the simplicity and the focus on what is critical makes this a great example of how to represent business intelligence.

6. Responsiveness

No matter your role, we’re all making decisions on the go. A great BI dashboard that only loads on a desktop is not a great dashboard. Instead:

• Optimize dashboards for different devices to provide a seamless user experience no matter where your audience is accessing the dashboard from.
• Design layouts that adapt to various screen sizes without losing clarity or functionality.
• Test dashboards on multiple devices to ensure consistent performance and usability.

With responsive dashboard design, business insights are more accessible and easier to share. And, in scenarios like this — when your CFO needs to check real-time data on their smartphone during an investor's meeting so they can present the marketing ROI — dashboard design can be a life-saver.

7. Accessibility

With the goal to make data as simple to interpret as possible, there are accessibility factors to consider, too. 

To make BI dashboards accessible:

• Use color palettes that are suitable for color-blind users and provide text alternatives for visual elements like charts and graphs. PowerBI’s high-contrast color mode offers an accessible view:

Other considerations include:

• Keeping fonts legible by using clear typefaces and avoiding overly small text.
• Designing interactive elements like buttons and filters to be easy to navigate for all users.
• Instead of putting everything on one dashboard, try to create an ecosystem of dashboards, where you can do one-level down in your analysis if needed.

Accessibility makes dashboards inclusive and usable by everyone, fostering better understanding and engagement across diverse audiences.

5 guidelines for user-friendly dashboards

A well-designed dashboard provides clear, actionable insights tailored to your user's needs. Whether you're a CMO analyzing campaign performance or a manager reviewing team metrics, simplicity and clarity are key. Here are five best practices to follow when building business intelligence dashboards:

1. Start with the user in mind

Each audience has unique needs. Tailor dashboards to provide the relevant, actionable insights they need to make data-informed decisions.

For example, a CMO may need a high-level view of campaign ROI while a sales manager might require detailed performance metrics. Design every feature to support the specific audience and their goals.

2. Keep it simple

Clean and concise is the goal. 

• Avoid overloading the dashboard with too much information. Use a clean design that highlights essential data without distractions. 
• White space helps improve readability and directs attention to key insights on a simple dashboard.

• Keep to the five-second rule: if users can’t understand the dashboard within five seconds, refine it until the most important details stand out. In the example above you can see that a CEO can review the key stats for each department in five seconds to see if growth is on trend and to spot any issues quickly

• Apply Gestalt psychology principles to make your design easy to engage with:
  
  
  • Proximity: Group related elements by location.
  • Similarity: Use consistent colors, shapes and fonts.
  • Closure: Design visuals to encourage mental completion.
  • Enclosure: Use borders to create distinct data groups.
  • Continuity: Present data in continuous flows for easier interpretation.
  • Connection: Link related data with visual lines.

Clutter wastes cognitive space and makes data seem overly complex. By applying these principles instead, your dashboards will be both intuitive and actionable.

The key to effective data presentation is to only keep the metrics you need to take your audience on a journey to action.

3. Give context

When it comes to flagging potential issues on your dashboards, a common mistake is assuming that your audience already has comprehensive experience with your numbers. 

Take a look at this dashboard, for example: 

Source: Nick Desbarats

At a glance, sure, this dashboard has some interesting metrics. However, there just isn’t enough context to understand at a glance if things are trending upward or if you need to flag any issues. 

That’s why we use benchmarks, goals and comparison trends to act as a frame of reference. But is it enough?

Here’s a section of that same dashboard with these indicators added: 

Source: Nick Desbarats

You might be thinking, “Yeah, with just a simple tweak to include trend arrows, traffic light colors and a ‘compared with previous periods’ indicator, this becomes a much simpler dashboard for any audience”, right? 

Not exactly. 

Now, instead of just picking up critical issues, you’re flagging everything. And flagging everything is the same as flagging nothing.

At a glance, an increase in employee satisfaction by 1.9% highlighted in green seems good. But really, an employee satisfaction rating of 5.2% is a serious issue.

Source: Nick Desbarats

The problem here is that you have so many metrics to drill into on a daily basis. Data analysis could take 40 minutes of untangling every day. And what’s worse is, because the layout isn’t really flagging issues, your dashboard on any given day of business compared to your worst day might not look that different without deep diving. 

Source: Nick Desbarats

Who can make quick decisions based on these? No one.

4. Make it in real time but don’t go overboard

Real-time data is crucial for timely decision-making, helping users like CMOs or operations managers act quickly on current insights.

But be careful here. Overusing real-time updates can distract users and make dashboards less effective. Most dashboards benefit from periodic updates, such as hourly, daily or weekly, depending on their purpose, rather than being in a constant state of flux.

Balance real-time data with historical data to provide a comprehensive view of performance. However, remember, stay focused on what’s critical. You can also use smart alerts to notify users of anomalies, allowing dashboards to remain actionable without constant refreshes.

5. Choose the right type of dashboard

Different dashboards serve different purposes:

• Strategic dashboards: Provide high-level insights for executives focused on long-term goals.
• Analytical dashboards: Allow for deeper data exploration, ideal for identifying trends.
• Operational dashboards: Deliver real-time updates for day-to-day monitoring.
• Tactical dashboards: Focus on short-term objectives and team performance tracking.

As mentioned before, it’s best to create an ecosystem of dashboards that complement each other rather than trying to get everything on one screen.

Automate your visualization with ETL tools

Extract, transform, load (ETL) solutions help you automate data visualization by:

• Gathering data: ETLs pull information from various sources into one system, making it ready for analysis and reporting.
• Cleaning and organizing: It prepares data for direct export into BI tools, removing errors and inconsistencies for smooth integration.
• Making it usable: An ETL solution transforms data into a format compatible with dashboards and reports for easy interpretation.
• Automating updates: It keeps exported reports and connected BI dashboards current with the latest data without manual effort.

Automation with an ETL tool streamlines reporting and improves insights because your data is aggregated directly from your advertising sources and organized as pre-selected KPIs you can then export to your BI tools choice. 

Some popular options include: 

• Funnel
• Microsoft Power BI
• Tableau
• Google Looker Studio

Start building BI dashboards that inspire action

Using ETL processes helps you organize and integrate data from multiple sources, making it ready for actionable insights. Combine this with clear, intuitive data visualization that focuses on the most relevant metrics to create BI dashboards that truly support decision-making. Say goodbye to data presentations that don’t inspire, and hello to BI dashboards that drive real and lasting action.