Review of the book Interactive Visual Data Analysis: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315152707 by Christian Tominski, Heidrun Schumann
Designing a good dashboard is an art. We need to answer questions like – who will use the dashboard? for what? when? and how will the interaction happen. Our team has studied dashboards and developed a model for choosing which one is the most suitable one ( https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/41120/1/gupea_2077_41120_1.pdf ).
However, we never studied what is important when constructing a dashboard, but the authors of this book did.
I’m super happy to have stumbled upon this book, because it has shown me how to think when constructing dashboards. It shows which elements are important and how to create actionable visual analytics, not how to use JavaScript to create a diagram.
I liked chapter 3 and 4 the most. They show how to move from simple visualizations to interactions and how to work with parameters of the visualizations. However, one needs to read chapter 2 as well to get some inspiration about which diagrams to use and how to use the visual attentive attributes like color, size or shape – both separately and in combination.
To sum up, if you want to construct a good dashboard, please read the book and I can promise you, it will not dissapoint you.
