I picked up this book not knowing 100% what information dashboards were – Stephen Few’s book is quite business-oriented, but I believe a dashboard can be loosely defined as a screen on which lots of disparate but linked pieces of information have to be displayed for quick and easy consumption and understanding. Taken in that sense, Few’s advice can be applied to many different types of software.

Few gives lots of advice on the best way to display data, particularly numerical data, which is fundamental to business. But probably the most useful advice he gives is – understand the user first, what s/he needs to know. Then understand the data , where the links are between them, and you will know how to organise it, and therefore how to display it.

Few’s Chapter 4 is the chapter most generally applicable by far, as it explains how to capitalise on the strengths of the human visual system to present data in such a way that it jumps out at you. You can do this by focusing on the preattentive attributes of visual perception, which I’ll list here for future reference:

• Colour
  
  • Hue
  • Intensity
• Position
  
  • 2D location
• Form
  
  • Orientation
  • Line length
  • Line width
  • Size
  • Shape
  • Added marks
  • Enclosure
• Motion
  
  • Flicker

The Gestalt Principles of Visual Perception also explain how you can present data so it’s naturally linked together in the mind:

• Proximity
• Similarity in colour, size, shape or orientation
• Enclosure (bounded by something)
• Closure (broken forms will still be perceived as closed if they suggest a regular shape)
• Continuity (similar to the above, but for lines rather than shapes)
• Connection (if something visually links them, they’re linked!)

Few then goes on to explain how these principles apply in the various graph types, and therefore how to use them. One thing he emphasises again and again is – don’t use pie charts (except perhaps in very limited circumstances), they’re a waste of space and it’s not easy to compare 2D sizes, so people will have to look at the text percentages anyway.

I thought at first that this book wouldn’t be all that useful, given that I’m not interested in this very business-oriented application domain, but it turned out to be a fairly good design book and I appreciated the examples he gives in the beginning and at the end. It didn’t take all that long to read either, so it certainly wasn’t a waste of time. It also pointed me to Colin Ware’s Information Visualisation book, which I think I’ll have to pick up sometime.