Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: BUY THIS
Comment: this book is worth every penny. i use it all the time as a reference and it's a good read.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: An excellent starting point for those of us with no visual design training
Comment: Mr. Few's book boils down to one message - the point of a dashboard is to convey the right information simply, without confusion or distraction. He then proceeds to show by copious examples the various techniques to use AND to avoid to accomplish this goal.
His points about how to visually focus on the data rather than the "fluff" in charts and overall design are excellent. Especially valuable are discussions of how placement, grouping and other non-data display design elements affect our interpretation of the data.
The author, however, does have a fairly large blind spot (if you will forgive the pun) regarding the use of color when the target audience includes people with visual disabilities such as color blindness (like myself). He has an entire chapter on Visual Perception, but fails to address this crucial issue when discussing "limits to visual perception". And at one point when specifically discussing designing his own bullet graphs for colorblind people, the author states "any hue will do" and then shows an example using a hue where I can NOT perceive the different gradients.
In summary, this is an excellent starter book on good dashboard design. However, if you have users with visual disabilities like mine, be sure to verify your design with your special case users.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Obviously more people need to read this book
Comment: I found this book to be a must have for anyone working with dashboards, BI tools and data visualization. Take a look around the web (or where you work) and you will see people violating Few's most common mistakes repeatedly. Features of these tools are being abused for a "gee whiz" impact that may impress some in a presentation or board room, but fail to deliver the most elegant and useful solution. Alas, we seem not to learn these most basic lessons with every new medium from the GUI to the web to dashboards. When it comes to dashboards, Few is "driving" in the right direction and when the initial excitement cools, I'm sure his approach and advice will be broadly recognized.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If You Like Pie Charts, Please Buy This Book.
Comment: First, I think this book has something to offer to everyone. But if you have already read at least two of Edward Tufte's books on visualizing information, then you are probably better off borrowing and browsing through this book for 20 or 30 minutes rather than purchasing it. The book is mostly derivative of the kind of work Tufte does, so it won't offer a lot of new ideas for readers well-read in the area. The first chapter contains an overview of the history/main issues in dashboard design. The final chapter includes helpful good and bad examples that demonstrate the main ideas introduced in this book. I think anyone can take something away from these sections of the book.
For the rest of you... do you think pie charts are pretty? Do you like those default 3D bar charts in MS Excel? For the sake of everyone you work with, please pick up this book. It's a good overview of issues in this area and you will be better at communicating information if you pay attention to the ideas and study all the examples of this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My Reference for Dashboard Design
Comment: If you were to listen to Dashboard software vendors then you'd think that information dashboards are built with speed dial, 3D pie-charts and bar-charts and nice background images. Of course what do these vendors know.
In this book you will find examples for many industries of what a good information dashboard could be like. It really is a learn by example. But as you go through the book, you notice that the same graphics artifacts are used again and again.
The author shows you to use the best artifacts for a given objective: sparklines, bar-charts, dot-plots and tables. You will also learn to make good use of your chart axis and borders so that they too can provide valuable information.
I've not read dozens of books on the topic but this one is certainly one of the very good one. He is also part of the Edward Tufte school of thought, to which I also adhere.
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