For my Canadian friends, here is a visualization dashboard that can be used to examine various data driven aspects of the upcoming elections. I’ve only recently come to understand the term, dashboard. It appears to be a visualization that you can control and personalize by adjusting various parameters of the visualization and how it handles the backend data.
With the Canadian federal election just a few days away, my colleagues at Dundas have created a neat interactive dashboard sample to help people understand how the various political parties are faring in terms of predicted seats and popularity. This was one of those last minute “hey wouldn’t it be neat if” ideas so kudos to the team for cranking this out so quickly.
Datavism Visualization Site: http://goo.gl/ljBzL
The Dashboard Page: http://goo.gl/QjH6l
Hi David,
Thanks for the shout-out! This sample was designed to expose a broader audience to the concept of a dashboard.
I think your definition is correct, from a functional perspective. Dashboards are indeed a collection of one or more visualizations fed from some sort of data source – and many are indeed interactive. Changing parameters or filters is one of many examples of interactivity.
They exist to offer some of the most critical information people in all sorts of roles need to make decisions, laid out within the confines of a screen. Organizations everywhere are dealing with increasingly-large volumes of complex data, sometimes with rows numbering in the billions. Computers may be great at storing and processing this amount of data, but unfortunately humans are not.
Dashboards provide a way for people to leverage that wealth of data and only display the metrics that are most critical, at a glance, while intuitively offering more details on demand. This form of brevity allows us to deal with the limits of our working memory, and these key, important metrics are known in my industry as “key performance indicators”. I suppose it is primarily used for business applications, although variations and permutations of dashboards are showing up everywhere. My online banking portal has a great dashboard, for example, that concisely gives me a great overview of my finances, where my money is being spent, how it compares to the budgets I’ve set for myself, etc.
Data visualization is an obvious method of presenting these metrics in a concise manner, if properly harnessed. It allows a broader range of people to understand complicated data and relationships by leveraging the power of our brain’s ability to perceive and process visual information.
At any rate, I hope this is helpful. Great work with your site, and best regards.