Information Dashboard Design: Displaying data for at-a-glance monitoring

Dashboards are a hot topic in our information-laden world. They are imagined by those in the design world (often very poorly) and implemented by programmers who do not take their imagination any further. This book, written by an acknowledged expert in the field of visualization, describes how to design dashboards that communicate essential data to users, mostly business-people. As such, its audience consists of designers, not programmers. Although I am a programmer, I enjoy “cross-training” my imagination by thinking in the intellectual “boxes” or “bins” of those around me.

Few introduces standard graphs and a couple new ones (bullet graphs and sparklines). He explains the use of each in standard fashion. His real contribution, after explaining the fairly standard song-and-dance, is through the introduction of these new graphs, one of which he invented. I was curious to try to implement these two graphs using R’s ggplot. Although I have no immediate use for these types of graphs, it’s nice to have new tools in the box of memory to explain people’s data accurately and effectively.