Designing Data Products - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 235

2. Reflect a well-understood structure of the business. By the time you
design a real-time dashboard, you should have a strong theory for how
the pieces of the business fit together (that is, the relationships between
key measures, drivers, and available actions). For example, in the call
center business, there are clearly defined success measures (for example,
wait time), a mathematical relationship between these measures and their
underlying drivers (for example, call volume), and known levers to address
problems (for example, staffing levels).
3. Support quick diagnosis of problems. The data presentation should
point directly to the likely source of the problem. Real-time dashboards
aren't the place for deep analysis or introspection into the drivers of the
business.
4. Simple data presentation. Real-time dashboards aren't the place for
complex or advanced data visualizations. Imagine you were Napoleon
and you had to use a half-completed version of Minard's graphic of the
march to Russia to make a battlefield decision in the next 5 minutes.
5. Granular view of the “unit of action.” Real-time dashboards are often
about tracking activity. It may be useful to show the raw data around
these events in the form of a ticker, scroll, or RSS feed. We use a real-time
tracker for our website called Sitemeter. It does a nice job of tracking the
basic unit of action—visitors (Figure A-6).
Figure A-6 A granular view of traffic on our website