5 Reasons We Love Dashboards (And You Should, Too!)


#1 Dashboards are easy to setup and easy to administrate.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of having a dashboard is how easy it is to create and administrate. Simply email your data from Excel, SPSS, or a CSV file and have a customized dashboard created for you online. With one click you can filter what you want to see; filter by gender, age or race. You are also able to customize colors and themes to match your company's style, which allows the user to better visualize findings. By using multiple tabs, you can organize which charts are the most important and which are not. Dashboards help you to see the metrics that will measure your success, while keeping data clear and concise. There are so many ways to view and share information, and getting started is a cinch.


#2 Dashboards help connect the dots between data sources.

Dashboards allow the user to easily view different sources of data in one place. For example, one could connect data from multiple sources such as survey data, research data, and sales information and view it in one spot. You can also setup multiple dashboards to keep different projects or client data separate. Instead of spending hours switching between multiple data sources, having everything under the same roof keeps data organized, separate, and secure.

#3 Dashboards help tell better stories and improve your bottom line.

The process of data monetization is taking raw data and converting it to something useful and meaningful. There is a lot of discussion about when is the right time to monetize data. When a company has data that they have collected through research, and it provides insight into other businesses, then the right time to monetize that data is now.

People learn best by seeing data visually as opposed to seeing it raw. Having a well-designed dashboard tells the story of your business; it points out problems as well as the future direction of the company. By using graphics and color you can more easily convey the story to the end user. When the end user can better understand the data, they can act on it in a meaningful way. The result is a boost to your bottom line, which could ultimately create cost savings over time.

#4 Dashboards give you presentation ready materials to share.

In addition to being extremely easy to set up and use, customized dashboards can quickly be exported to PowerPoint and PDFs, shared to social media sites, and made into infographics in seconds. Tag clouds, or sometimes known as word clouds, are used to visually aggregate large textual data. Word clouds are especially useful for qualitative data and are used to highlight the main themes of a particular work. By using side-by-side comparisons, you can also compare two variables within the same chart at one time. These are just a few of the ways you can customize and share your dashboard when you are ready to present.

#5 Dashboards are adapting to let us view data anytime and anywhere.

IBM Smarter Comms found that as channels come together to create integrated experiences, 90% of users use multiple screens at once. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important that dashboards are cross-compatible on many different platforms. According to a study by Super Monitoring, mobile adoption and market share is sharply on the rise. In fact, 50% of mobile phone users use that as their primary source of internet.

We can no longer deny that people are using their mobile phones to browse the web and make purchases. In order to stay competitive you simply must have a mobile-enabled website. Super Monitoring goes as far to say that, "Not having a mobile optimized website is like closing your store one day each week." Dashboards are mobile compatible can be viewed on smartphones, tablets, and laptops anytime and anywhere.

Want to learn more about dashboards?

To learn more about dashboards and see some examples, check out our webinar called How to Create Dashboards People Love to Use hosted by Survey Analytics with special guest Anup Surendran, Director of Enterprise Services from SecondPrism. The webinar covers contextual infographics, monetizing data sets, people dashboards, examples, a live demonstration and more.



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