Dashboard Purpose

Creating meaningful data visualizations starts with a deep understanding of the data and the purpose it serves. To achieve this, you need to answer a few key questions: Who is your audience? What are you trying to show? How will you show it?

Who is Your Target Audience?

Understanding the audience is essential for designing visuals that meet their needs. Different groups look for different levels of detail and insights:

• Executives need high-level summaries, such as performance highlights and trends, to support strategic decisions.
• Managers require detailed breakdowns to monitor team or departmental progress.
• Team members focus on daily metrics, like individual tasks, goals, and immediate results.

Example

• If you are creating a loan dashboard for executives, it focusses on total loan amounts, repayment performance, and high-level trends by region.
• For loan managers, it includes loan disbursement breakdowns by state, overdue loan percentages, and default rates for specific loan categories.

What are You Trying to Show?

Every visualization must have a clear purpose. Identifying the problem or understanding answers from the data helps define what needs to be shown. Identifying key performance indicators helps in this direction.

Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are the most important numbers or metrics used to measure progress toward a goal. In data visualization, KPIs help highlight what matters most, allowing people to quickly understand performance, spot problems, and make better decisions.

Choosing the right KPIs depends on the purpose of the visualization and the needs of the audience. For example, in a loan dataset, KPIs could include total loan disbursements, overdue loan amounts, or repayment success rates. These metrics help focus on key areas like financial performance, loan processing, and customer repayment behaviour.

To make KPIs useful, they should be relevant, clear, and measurable. For instance, a loan manager might track state-wise loan disbursements to compare performance across regions. By identifying and visualizing the right KPIs, businesses can monitor progress, identify issues, and take meaningful actions to improve performance.

Depending on the type of data the KPIs measure, they can be tracked accordingly.

• Trends over time: A line graph works well for displaying patterns, such as monthly growth in loan disbursements.
• Comparisons: A bar chart effectively highlights differences, such as loan performance across states like California, Texas, and Arizona.
• Proportions: A pie chart shows parts of a whole, such as the percentage of overdue loans compared to fully repaid ones.

Example

If you want to identify which region performed the best, use a bar chart. If you want to show how revenue changed over the past year, a line graph will clearly display the trend.

How to Present You Data

Choosing the right type of visual plays a key role in making the data easy to understand. Each type of visual serves a specific purpose:

• Bar Charts: Ideal for comparing categories, such as loan amounts across different states.

• Line Graphs: Best for showing trends, such as the rise or fall of loan disbursements over time.

• Pie Charts: Useful for displaying proportions, like the share of overdue loans compared to repaid loans.

• Tables: Effective when exact numbers are needed, such as showing the top states with the highest loan disbursements.

Example

A pie chart can clearly highlight that overdue loans make up 30% of the total, while the remaining 70% are repaid.