Top 6 Interactive Dashboard Features to Empower Your Users (2022)
I’ve reviewed hundreds of dashboards over time and over 70% simply don’t give the users enough ways to interact with them, which severely limits their benefit. In this post I’ll share the key interactive features that I’ve learned will give your users the power to level up to awesomeness!
The top interactive features for dashboard users include advanced filters, insightful view swaps, viz in tooltips, data access, supporting navigation and on demand data literacy. There is a lot going on in each of those areas, so let’s get started.
Advanced Filters
If you design a dashboard to visualize exactly the insights and/or views that you feel are important, then you are not empowering the user to self-serve additional insights in the data that either you missed, or meets their evolving needs.
Perhaps your focus is visualizing data at an organization level, but then in the future, the user’s focus shifts to a more granular team level. Another example, your data set might have 5 key attributes on associates to visualize like title, city, job name, manager name, and financial hierarchy. However, if you add additional attributes, like work from home status or time since last title change, then the user can leverage filters to discover additional insights beyond the original need.
Insightful Viz Swaps
A viz swap is basically a way for the user to replace one visual with another. As developers, we always have limited real estate to work with on our dashboards, which is why design is so important. This is one way to maximize your use of limited space while still giving the users more insights.
For example, you could swap out two completely different graphs on two different topics, or you could simply swap a chart with a data grid showing the numbers behind the chart for users who need that. Best practice: Your dashboards should contain both visualizations and data grids in harmony to be the most useful. Users need both, so don’t get stuck using only one or the other or you will have limited adoption.
Viz in Tooltips
You know those little pop ups you get when hovering your mouse over something? Those can be extremely powerful! When hovering over graphs, instead of just displaying the value of the data point in a pop up, level up and build a separate view inside that tooltip. A great way to leverage this feature is that, when hovering over a section in your chart, another view pops up with a deeper dive into that specific population. This functionality gives users more information with minimal effort and can really elevate the utility of your dashboard.
Multi-Dashboard Navigation
In most business areas, more than one dashboard is needed to cover everything. I’ve been on teams with 70 reports and on up to 3,000+, but the reality is that when your inventory goes beyond 10 it becomes difficult for the user to know where to go to find just the right view that they need.
Your dashboard should be like a webpage, where you embed links to supplemental views that are commonly needed. Think of that great pipeline dashboard showing everything in flight, but then the data might raise a question around the trend in new items entering the pipeline, which is on a different dashboard. Providing a link on page so that users can navigate to those different dashboards will not only make it easy, but also let them know that the view exists!
Access to Data
Give your users the ability to get to the data behind your visuals and they will be forever grateful! This is a debatable topic as some reporting teams fear what untrained users will do with the data (build shadow reporting, draw incorrect conclusions, etc.). However, it is also impossible to build a dashboard that addresses every possible future question, so don’t fight a losing battle! Give them a way to download safe, curated data that will help meet the needs that your dashboard isn’t solving for.
How I like to do this is by building a specific dashboard just for the data downloads and then linking users to it. By making it separate, you can then capture usage data. If you find a user is going to the download on a routine basis, then you have an opportunity to talk with them to find out what they need that your dashboard isn’t providing, and then incorporate it officially for them.
On Demand Data Literacy
It is becoming increasingly important for users of data to understand how the metrics are created. We talk a lot about actionable insights, but what if the action is based on a number that was calculated using a different definition than the user expected? That can lead to bad decisions that are harmful to the business. Or perhaps your user is presenting your metric in a meeting, and they get questions like, “How is that metric calculated?” or “Where is the data coming from?”. Chances are they won’t know, which can create suspicion around the accuracy of the number itself.
For your key metrics, add an info icon that, when clicked, shows a pop up of the definition for that metric, where the data comes from, and how it is calculated. Then your user will have more confidence and can even answer those questions on the spot.
So that’s a wrap! These are the key, interactive features that I’ve seen which really amplify the user’s ability to get value from a dashboard. But what have you experienced? Are there others you would add to this list? Please leave a comment if you have a suggestion for myself and the community, thanks!
