The Big Book of Dashboards: Visualizing Your Data Using Real-World Business Scenarios 1st Edition

I really enjoyed BBOD, and I am incorporating its many nuggets into my dashboards. Learning by example and counter-example is the best method (see Siegfried Engelmann fore more on that), and that's the format of this book. There are related webinars on the Tableau website that are definitely worth listening to.The thing to keep in mind about this book is that's it's not a step-by-step cookbook of how to technically achieve vizzes in Tableau. It's a book about design. It can quickly take you from making average, hum-drum (if not disorganized and confusing) dashboards to world-class material.Below are some thoughts on certain vizzes/chapters:· CH 2 and 20 - Course Metrics and Complaints - I would encourage Tableau to research gray text readability. Perhaps I have a genetic rod deficiency, or maybe it's because of my age, but I find the gray text to be hard to read. I think the effort to reduce contrast crosses a usability threshold. I'd like to see some tests of a type "solve a problem in this dashboard" with different gray scales in text. I'd wager darker equals a faster solution up to a certain point after which it doesn't matter. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this: monitor size, font size, bold, brightness, contrast, so you have to experiment with what works for you and the majority or your users.· CH 11 - Premier League Player Performance Metric. I think the applicability of this viz approach can be generalized even further to unit:subset:universe. For this football (soccer) viz, it's the most recent match, 5 next most recent, then all season. So the viz is by sets according to time. It could also be by organizational hierarchy as in employee: department: division for a fixed time period. In this same manner, Chapter 3 (speaker ratings) is conceptually equivalent, but it lacks the subset level. You could have speaker, topic area, and then all others.CH 12 - Rugby Dashboard - This is an interesting chapter. One option for a scoring viz us using Gantt Bars. t would be nice the book's dashboard were shaded between the lines to emphasize who is leading. I know this is a long-sought (by some) Tableau function, and maybe it's not too hard to implement if it's reimagined as a "Gantt Line", which would be identical to a Gantt Bar use case, except that it graphs lines while coloring the intermediate space. You can kinda do that with 3 levels of unstacked area charts... but not exactly.· CH 21 - Overall, I like the aesthetics of the Hospital Operating room dashboard, but I expected the screaming cat icon ("don't do this!") over the top of it. The calendar of the viz resembles the periodic table of elements, and the labels seem to be at odds with the "reduce clutter" guideline. The numbers are just a bit too much for me, but they could be exactly what the customer wanted in this case. Hey, chemists LIKE the periodic table! And some people don't want to hover for tooltip details, or they may have other motivations. I like to try to put myself in the shoes of the consumer and ask "Would the color itself be sufficient for me to make an actionable decision?" To me, the numbers don't have to be on the viz, and the calendars can be shrunken to show other information, but the dashboard isn't designed for me.Overall, this book is a "top shelf" selection on dashboard design that you can revisit over and over for best practices.

This book is a must have for many data visualization specialists, particularly if you use Tableau. In general I was very happy with this book. The selected dashboards that were presented were good representations of what can be needed in different situations. The accompanying explanations helped make sense why decisions were appropriate, or what might be improved. The quality of the color print made the illustrations easy on the eyes and there wasn't guesswork about what was being included in a dashboard or what color combination was involved.My only criticism was that the layout could have been improved- text would frequently reference a screenshot that wasn't visible until the page was turned.

In the companies I usually see people not knowing from where to start in building their dashboard. And telling them "think about the story and your workflow" is not sufficient.The book gives good starting point to such users - examples, why they work, what are other applications.If you are searching for reference/guidelines/inspiration for business dashboards it is good book. However, infographics are barely covered - missing some good examples of interactive work that is between dashboard and infographic. Technology has come far to support more than static.However if you have longer experience in the field, you will find yourself thinking that authors failed in making every chapter be excellent.Some chapters seemed well thought and detailed, while some chapters seemed as not providing enough discussion - you see that certain dashboard could had been done much better, and from there at least some other solutions could have been discussed.Having less chapters with actual examples and having more deeper content on other chapters would create a better result.I missed the wow effect, and the book didn't open completely new horizons for me.

Very nice book. I liked the fact that it gives good examples as well as bad examples. The bad examples are well selected so that you learn what to avoid.

I'm embarrassed to think about how many books I've purchased about presenting data and information visually. To be frank, visual storytelling is more important than having the right data. If people can quickly and easily consume the data, you likely have a winner. You'll lose them fast if it is just a bunch of graphs.The Big Book of Dashboards does a great job of showing you how to present data. It also does a great job of showing you how NOT to present the data. Finally, they show you how to combine multiple relevant datasets into one visualization in a very simple and easy-to-consume format.My company is in the business of telling stories with data. This book has and will continue to up our game. Thanks Steve, Jeffrey, and Andy for a great job.