Designing Data Products - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 234

8 FEATURES OF SUCCESSFUL REAL-TIME
DASHBOARDS
By Zach Gemignani
Real-time dashboards—the types that show up on a big screen in a call cen-
ter—are an entirely different beast than your standard management dashboard.
Their job is to support immediate decision-making. As a result, the information
must be easy to interpret, alert users to problems, and make the next action
obvious. In addition to key success metrics, real-time dashboards may show
detailed data about the action “on the ground.” Here are eight characteristics
that can make a real-time dashboard effective:
1. A summary status that indicates how things stand overall. Users need
to tell at a glance whether they should worry. Here's a great example from
an iPhone app called Umbrella. The app provides the most important
information you need from a weather report (Figure A-5).
Figure A-5 The direct approach to weather forecasts