At the beginning of this year, I got a project to prepare a decent looking demo dashboard in Power BI for our company to use at presales meetings. I chose the topic of utilization as it’s something everyone is interested in, regardless of the industry they’re working in. Tracking the productivity and efficiency of employees is crucial to all organizations, as a higher utilization rate will most likely result in more revenue for the company. Having a utilization report can help you detect unexploited and overdriven capabilities, so as to better plan your resources. The end result came out as below, but the way leading here was not the easiest one. Read on to explore the journey in my no. 1 strive in dataviz, dashboard design!
How do I start planning a dashboard from zero?
At first, I put together all the charts and KPI tiles I intend to use for the visualization on a blank canvas and organize them so that they would both follow business logic and provide good user experience. For this look, I wanted to do something modern, that has high contrast yet remains minimal, so I decided to go with minty colours on a dark background. It’s hard to draw something while you can’t see the outcome, so from a very early stage, I started using my sketch as a Power BI wallpaper and then finetuned it based on what I saw in the software. It might have taken more than 20 iterations while it came out as expected and took a lot of hours to accomplish.
The interactive version can be checked out in the Power BI Data Stories Gallery, while dashboard functionality is demonstrated in the below animation.
Judit Bekker 