Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

List Price: $34.99 Discount Price: $17.55

Customer Reviews:

Obviously more people need to read this book [Posted on 2008-04-01]
I found this book to be a must have for anyone working with dashboards, BI tools and data visualization. Take a look around the web (or where you work) and you will see people violating Few's most common mistakes repeatedly. Features of these tools are being abused for a "gee whiz" impact that may impress some in a presentation or board room, but fail to deliver the most elegant and useful solution. Alas, we seem not to learn these most basic lessons with every new medium from the GUI to the web to dashboards. When it comes to dashboards, Few is "driving" in the right direction and when the initial excitement cools, I'm sure his approach and advice will be broadly recognized.

An excellent starting point for those of us with no visual design training [Posted on 2008-04-07]
Mr. Few's book boils down to one message - the point of a dashboard is to convey the right information simply, without confusion or distraction. He then proceeds to show by copious examples the various techniques to use AND to avoid to accomplish this goal.

His points about how to visually focus on the data rather than the "fluff" in charts and overall design are excellent. Especially valuable are discussions of how placement, grouping and other non-data display design elements affect our interpretation of the data.

The author, however, does have a fairly large blind spot (if you will forgive the pun) regarding the use of color when the target audience includes people with visual disabilities such as color blindness (like myself). He has an entire chapter on Visual Perception, but fails to address this crucial issue when discussing "limits to visual perception". And at one point when specifically discussing designing his own bullet graphs for colorblind people, the author states "any hue will do" and then shows an example using a hue where I can NOT perceive the different gradients.

In summary, this is an excellent starter book on good dashboard design. However, if you have users with visual disabilities like mine, be sure to verify your design with your special case users.

BUY THIS [Posted on 2008-04-17]
this book is worth every penny. i use it all the time as a reference and it's a good read.

Good, Practical Contribution to Visually Communicating Data [Posted on 2008-05-26]
This book offers more than the title might suggest...more specifically, this title provides a good foundation for how to communicate data visually in general. Stephen Few does a good job demonstrating examples of good and "not so good" visual presentations of data utilizing Information Dashboards.

I found the example Information Dashboards at the end of the book to be particularly useful. This book could serve as a good reference for those interested in effectively communicating data visually.

Decent book [Posted on 2008-06-14]
Nutshell review - A decent book on dashboard design. I had hoped for more examples of good design rather than more examples of bad. Worth looking at nonetheless.

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