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Ask HN: Examples of truly great dashboards?

21 points by grantjgordon ↗ HN
Every project I've ever worked on has required a dashboard of some sort at some point or another. Yet I've never been able to find more than a few decent examples to learn from. A few that come to mind are:

Chartbeat Google Analytics

Do you have any web or mobile application dashboards that you love? Or even like?

Thanks in advance!

14 comments

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caw
I have a couple of dashboards that I like, but they're not publicly available. I have graphs where literally every pixel on the line is a datapoint, and I'm displaying 5 or 6 datasets on the same graph.

Try reading up on some of Edward Tufte's material. The dashboards that I like tend to follow his style closely. There's also a Tufte training class you can go to; some of my co-workers went last year. It's rather inexpensive as far as training goes.

grantjgordon
Tufte is fantastic. I've read a few of his books, and I completely agree. Thanks for the help! :)
ejpastorino
Getting a good dashboard is really a hard task. It varies from business to business. The important thing is to identify some metrics and KPIs you want to be aware of.

Initially, it would show very few metrics or charts that can give you a quick snapshot of the business so you can see how it's performing very quickly. But it should be possible to dig into more data and visualize it in many different ways to get better insights.

On most apps I've worked, we've always opted to build out own dashboard because there was no out-of-the-box solution. We would gather data from inside the app and also use some external services like mixpanel or google analytics. Also, lately I've been moving towards more custom charts and graphs made with d3.js which is extremely powerful.

Nowadays there are a couple of products that let you craft your own dashboard like https://www.leftronic.com/ and http://www.geckoboard.com/

You can get some ideas there and by looking similar products. MixPanel and KissMetrics also provide some inspiration. And doing a search on dribbble can give you some ideas also: http://dribbble.com/search?q=dashboard

A really good book on data visualization is "Designing with Data" by Brian Suda: http://www.designingwithdata.com/

grantjgordon
Thanks for your thoughts and links! I especially like geckoboard, and I'm a big fan of Brian Suda. The challenge for me is definitely in the laying out of the unique data for that particular context in a visually appealing way. I guess what I'm trying to do, when you really boil it down, is assemble a toolbox of some tricks to use as starting points from a design perspective, and these are really helping.
juriga
I'm currently working on something that involves creating lots of custom dashboards. Here's a list of examples that I collected for design inspiration:

https://kippt.com/jtuulos/dashboard-inspiration

I hope you find these helpful. I'll be extending the list based on the suggestions in this thread.

ig1
The book "Information Dashboard Design" is a good starting point for the fundamentals.
debacle
Magento, for all of its faults, has a pretty excellent dashboard for an eCommerce product.
dglassan
If you're looking for design inspiration then check out the admin themes on themeforest.net, lots of great examples there if you filter by # of sales. Although it won't give you a lot of ideas as far as functionality goes