Spotlight customer reviews:
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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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My Type of Design Book
Comment: I stumbled across this while browsing around a Chapters bookstore in Vancouver and I'm glad I did. It's inexpensive, short and to the point, full of colourful examples and well worth my time.
I couldn't say whether or not this information is better seen elsewhere (I haven't yet read Tufte) I will say that I did learn much from its presentation here and highly recommend it to anyone working on a dashboard. One could level the same criticisms against Don't Make Me Think, but its brief and quirky presentation elevates it over its sources' typically verbose and dry styles. Perhaps that's the same with Few, I couldn't say.
If you're anywhere near a dashboard, I suggest giving this a quick read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Elegant Simplicity
Comment: All of us are living with more data in our lives. Every day the amount of data is growing. Not surprisingly, there is also a growing number of software companies attempting to "help" us navigate all of this data. Dashboards are a recent advancement in database and business intelligence software that attempts to consolidate all of the reports, charts, graphs that we use all day onto a single screen. Unfortunately, most software vendors have missed the mark. They have not done a great job with the visual design of dashboards.
Stephen Few provides a great overview of dashboard design in this book. Chapter three is particularly good. In it, he lists thirteen common mistakes of dashboard design. Business intelligence software vendors and consultants should definitely read this. Like Edward Tufte before him, Few promotes elegant simplicity as a design goal for visual interfaces. He goes deeper than Tufte, however, and provides many more specific examples.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent "How to do" guideline
Comment: This book provides a very good framework for how to graphically design performance dashboards.
It focuses entirely on the graphical design and does not take into account aspects of selecting the right KPIs, how to gather data, and how to make dashboards interactive and supporting root cause analysis.
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