If you’ve ever sat in the driver’s seat of an automobile, you’ve used the dashboard—or “instrument cluster,” to use the technical term. The dashboard puts all the information you need front and center, so you don’t have to take your eyes off the road to see what’s going on with the car.
There was a time when lots of information was available on a car’s dashboard. In addition to the familiar speedometer, fuel level, and coolant temperature, some dashboards included indicators such as battery voltage, oil pressure, and more.
In modern cars, the information on the dashboard has been reduced to the bare minimum needed to operate the vehicle. Electric and hybrid vehicles have a bit more information about battery health, but in large part, the only other thing you’re likely to see is one of several “idiot lights” that illuminate when something is wrong.
Modern information systems have adopted the dashboard model for all kinds of applications. Almost any business process you can think of can benefit from having a one-stop-shop for all essential information. You can see at a glance the health of that process, neatly summarized and designed. It’s even better if the information updates automatically in real time, or something close to it.
The “at a glance” part is important. To return to automobile dashboards for a moment, there was a time in the mid-1980s when car makers thought it was a sign of technological prowess to replace speedometers based on a mechanical needle with a snazzy LED readout that showed the exact number.
This turned out to be a bad idea, because drivers had to take their focus away from the road longer in order to read the number. It requires more cognitive effort than glancing at a needle and knowing that if it’s pointing in a certain direction and the vehicle speed is appropriate, without having to read any actual numbers. Most cars have returned either to mechanical needles or graphical representations of needles.
Similarly, with a computerized dashboard summarizing the status of a business process, it’s undesirable to make users read actual numbers or focus on endless tables. A shipping department supervisor doesn’t need to know the exact number of orders fulfilled; a better indicator is whether the team is on track to finish the day’s orders by the time the UPS truck arrives in the afternoon. This can be represented with a simple red/yellow/green “traffic light” indicator. Green is good, and that’s all the supervisor needs to know.
Computerized dashboards can be delivered in any of a number of ways—through standalone PC applications, mobile apps, or web apps. Web aps have seen growing popularity recently, so for the sake of brevity in this article, we’ll call them all “web dashboards.”
Fintech (financial technology) applications have proven to be particularly fertile ground for the move to dashboards. It’s not hard to understand why:
In short, web dashboards lend themselves nicely to fintech and the requirements of fintech users. Accordingly, fintech developers have been implementing dashboards to monitor things such as:
…and so on. The possibilities are endless.
The process of designing a web dashboard for fintech or anything else, is trickier than it might seem. Designers need to ask important questions:
The advent of mobile tech, advanced web application development, and big data analytics has created an environment in which compelling web dashboards can be built and deployed easily. Business users can look at their data from angles that were difficult or impossible—or simply not thought of—just a few years ago. Web dashboards have enabled businesses and global organizations to make better decisions more quickly; short-term, tactical decisions and long-term, strategic ones.
The bottom line is, the informed-decision-making ability afforded by good dashboards gives businesses that use those dashboards an effective, competitive advantage over their peers that don’t. Little wonder, then, that dashboards are in such high demand today.