🍱 How To Design Effective Dashboard UX (+ Figma Kits). With practical techniques to drive accurate decisions with the right data.
🤔 Business decisions need reliable insights to support them.
✅ Good dashboards deliver relevant and unbiased insights.
✅ They require clean, well-organized, well-formatted data.
✅ Often packed in a tight grid, with little whitespace (if any).
🚫 Scrolling is inefficient in dashboards: makes comparing hard.
✅ Start with the audience and decisions they need to make.
✅ Study where, when and how the dashboard will be used.
✅ Study what metrics/data would support user’s decisions.
✅ Explore how to aggregate, organize and filter this data.
✅ More data → more filters/views, less data → single values.
🚫 Simpler ≠ better: match user expertise when choosing charts.
✅ Prioritize metrics: key insights → top left, rest → bottom right.
✅ Then set layout density: open, table, grouped or schematic.
✅ Add customizable presets, layouts, views + guides, videos.
✅ Next, sketch dashboards on paper, get feedback, iterate.
When designing dashboards, the most damaging thing we can do is to oversimplify a complex domain, or mislead the audience. Our data must be complete and unbiased, our insights accurate and up-to-date, and our UI must match users’ varying levels of data literacy.
Dashboard value is measured by useful actions it prompts. So invest most of the design time scrutinizing metrics needed to drive relevant insights. Bring data owners and developers early in the process. You will need their support to find sources, but also clean, verify, aggregate, organize and filter data.
Good questions to ask:
🧭 What decisions do you want to be more informed on? (Purpose)
😤 What’s the hardest thing about these decisions? (Frustrations)
📊 Describe how you are making these decisions? (Sources)
🗃️ What data helps you make these decisions? (Metrics)
🧠 How much detail is needed for each metric? (Data literacy)
🚀 How often will you be using this dashboard? (Value)
🎲 What constraints should we know about? (Risks)
And, most importantly, test dashboards repeatedly with actual users. Choose representative tasks and see how successful users are. It won’t be right the first time, but once you get beyond 80% success rate, your users might never leave your dashboard again.
✤ Dashboard Patterns + Figma Kits:
Data Dashboards UX: https://lnkd.in/eticxU-N 👍
dYdX: https://lnkd.in/d6yvKS6G 👍
Ethr: https://lnkd.in/eSTzcN7V
Orange: https://lnkd.in/ewBJZcgC 👍
Semrush Charts + Tables: https://lnkd.in/dnDRtG32 👍
UI Charts: https://lnkd.in/eJkyB6zS
UKO: https://lnkd.in/ehvcSnuV 👍
Wireframes: https://lnkd.in/e-m3VQqs 👍
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