Dashboard Development Process

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Creating dashboards requires much more than knowing how to use Tableau. It relies on data visualization best practices, and integral to that is knowing who will be consuming the dashboards, how they’ll be interacting with them, and what questions they expect the dashboards to answer.

Dashboard Design & Development Process – UD³

UD³ is Unilytics’ proprietary process for agile dashboard design, construction, and release. We leveraged our vast experience creating hundreds of dashboards to develop and hone UD³ to ensure maximum relevant insight is delivered by each and every dashboard.

Central to UD³ is agile development with one week sprints. Clients see immediate results and provide regular feedback to ensure engagements are progressing as desired. Data preparation, integration, and data governance are executed in parallel to dashboard development to ensure projects move forward quickly.

Anyone can build dashboards, but only UD³ optimizes their value to your organization.

1. CONCEPTION

1. Identify Audience: the primary end-user audience for the dashboard.
2. Main Question: the central question your dashboard answers. Corporate Key Performance Indicators are considered (and time permitted identified) to ensure dashboard delivers on those metrics.
3. Theme: the main interactive concept (e.g., geography, time-series, guided analytics, etc.) you will use to answer the question.

2. VISUALIZATION

1. Primary View(s): the one or two primary views that visually address your main question for the specific audience and align with the theme that has been selected (e.g., maps for geography, lines or bars for time-series, etc.).
2. Support Views: contributory or helpful views that support, refine, or add context to the primary view(s).
3. Layout: placement and alignment of views in a way that focuses end-user attention on the primary view(s) with supporting views placed around them and visual indicators highlighting how the support views interact with the primary view.

3. FINALIZATION

1. Interact Elements: set up interactions between primary and supporting views in a logical, progressively detailed sequence.
2. Perfect Look & Feel: finalize alignments, fine tune color, fonts, font consistency, and ensure adherence to visual standards.

Tableau Training Courses

Our Tableau Training sessions are built on the UD³ methodology, so you will learn to incorporate best practices for performance, visualization, and release of Tableau Dashboards. LEARN MORE