Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

If you read title of this article and didn't exit the page, you probably know that implementation of various dashboards in business applications is rather new and popular trend. As all new tendencies that don't have firm rules, executive dashboards raised a lot of discussions on practical usefulness of both complete concept and separate dashboard elements. One of the points at issue is the use of graphical elements imitating real analog devices to represent values. In this article I tried to state basic principles of using such elements.

In general, initial meaning of the Executive Dashboard term faintly relates to real dashboards and means special type of reports providing the most important business performance indices in real time. It is expected that Executive Dashboards as well as all other reports provide data in tabular form and more rarely as charts and diagrams. Though, powerful graphical tools that are used by developers and users of business systems boost literal interpretation of the Dashboard term.

As I am a power engineering specialist by training, I faced quite a lot of point indicators (gauges) in practice. And contrary to the widespread opinion that such devices are extremely convenient in most cases it is not true. Anyone who has ever worked with point and numeric multimeters can confirm that numeric meters are more convenient since you don't need to wait till the pointer stops, strain your eyes to match pointer reflection on the mirror strip with the pointer itself and to count divisions on the scale. And, of course, to get accurate registration you need to keep the device right before your eyes (or eyes before the device). Vibration and poor light don't contribute to getting accurate registration. At first, the idea of using control panels (dashboards) in business applications seemed incredible to me. What? Back to lithic age? Do you really want to fill the whole screen with these archaistic point devices? Leave no pixels to display hundreds of indices that are even more important for business analysts then those in the screen?

CEO Executive dashboardThis impression was reinforced by Executive Dashboards I have already seen, as they were eye-catching and useless. Do you think that CEO report should look exactly like car dashboard? Of course, not. This is not prestigious; it should look like PLANE dashboard! So, most of such creative solutions impress at presentations, but they are completely useless in practice.

In spite of that, as a co-owner of the company that specializes in development of components designed to emulate real dashboards, I couldn't but become interested in a new market for our products. More careful analysis discovered that along with the mentioned before "masterpiece" dashboards there is quite a good number of perfect samples of using gauges.

And although I still think that the use of gauges is reasonable only in some business applications, correct utilization of such components can dramatically improve application usability and even raise it to a new level.

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