Unit 5: Building visual reports
CSA202: Data Analytics and Visualization
Ms. Pema Wangmo
Gyalpozhing College of Information Technology
Royal University of Bhutan
BCS Year II, Sem I
Learning objective
● Overview of dashboard
● Types of dashboards
● Dashboard tools and framework
Technical definition:
Graphical user interface that
visualizes data relevant to a business
Dashboard
objective or process
In other words:
Interactive graphs that users can
explore to gain insights
Decision making tool
Transforming data into change
If a dashboard that isn’t aligned to a
goal, it isn’t doing its job. A dashboard
Dashboard
supports decisions, by prompting the
need to make them, and providing
information to enable them.
A great dashboard
starts with
“what is your goal?”
Effective
dashboards A good dashboard is one that aligns to a
business process, and supports action
and decisions
enable It isn’t one that organises the data into
visual representations
decisions
Poor planning and presentation
leads to ineffective dashboard.
Ineffective
As a result, if a dashboard isn’t well
designed around business objectives:
• Decision makers get frustrated Dashboard
• Leadership provides less buy in
• Users fail to make decisions
• Users make bad decisions
• Negative impact on business
Poorly
designed
dashboard
Poorly designed dashboard
● It presents too much information, looks cluttered, and readers don’t know
where to look at first.
● There are way too many colors, without apparent meaningful purpose, and
it’s not clear if or how similar the colors relate to each other. (UX)
● The information cannot be immediately understood. It takes a while to
comprehend what you are actually looking at.
Well designed
dashboard
Well designed dashboard
● The dashboard looks visually appealing but does not draw attention away from the data
itself by using distracting and unnecessary graphics.
● The colour scheme used throughout the dashboard helps it to look bright, clean and
clear.
● The amount of data presented in each graph is sufficient enough to provide value
without looking cluttered and hard to interpret.
Choosing the right type of dashboard
● In this data-driven world, many dashboard types are changing the way a successful
business intelligence strategy is conducted.
● That means that although you can have a healthy approach to your business
development, if you don’t communicate the right sets of data to the right people in
your company, long-term success can be jeopardized and costly.
● This is why choosing the right type of dashboard can bring lasting and cost-effective
results.
● The important thing is that you identify what questions you are trying to answer before
you build a dashboard.
1. KPI/Operational
2. Analytical or tactical Types of
3. Strategic dashboard
1. KPI/Operational dashboard
● The users of such dashboards are familiar with the process being monitored, and they
view the dashboard on a frequent basis, tracking and monitoring a process in order to
take corrective or improving actions
● Provide instant answers and insights to business users
Example
Use case: call centre management
● Call centre manager to control call KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
● Several call centre teams handle different categories of calls, such as sales or
complaints
● Calls need to be answered within a certain timeframe. If the answer time takes too
long, the call centre manager can redirect calls to less busy teams
2. Analytical or tactical
● Provides more comprehensive overview of a business process, unit or department
● They emphasize a broad summary of various aspects of the business process, with a
focus on indicating to the user when a decision may need to be made, with the
necessary information to drive that decision.
● Allow exploration of data to find deeper insights
Use case: manage
incident
Actions:
1) act on open
incident
2) explore incidents
by type
and unit
Strategic dashboard
● This dashboard takes a high level view of a broad process or business area – looking at
multiple and completely different, and often unrelated aspects in order to provide an
overview and drive strategic thinking
● Used by senior management to drive strategic decisions, with limited exploration and
interactivity
Strategic dashboard
Dashboard tools and frameworks
Quick overview
● Streamlit, Dash, and Panel are full dashboarding solutions, focused on Python-based data analytics and
running on the Tornado and Flask web frameworks.
● Shiny is a full dashboarding solution focused on data analytics with R.
● Jupyter is a notebook that data scientists use to analyze and manipulate data. You can also use it to
visualize data.
● Voila is a library that turns individual Jupyter notebooks into interactive web pages.
● Flask is a Python web framework for building websites and apps – not necessarily with a data science focus.
● Maturity: Based on the age of the project and how stable it is.
● Popularity: Based on adoption and GitHub stars.
● Simplicity: Based on how easy it is to get started using the library.
● Adaptability: Based on how flexible and opinionated the library is.
● Focus: Based on what problem the library solves.
any questions??
Find me at pemawangmo.gcit@rub.edu.bt
