Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:  
Summary: Good guidelines for dashboards & a lot of slagging
Comment: Found this book great for discussing how to better structure dashboard interfaces yet as other reviews highlight the real meat is only a fraction of the book.
I think this book suits programmers, dreamweaver artists and web project managers more than it does information designers as many of the insights are intuitive to them.
What I struggled with the most was the amount of slagging of existing systems that the author does. For all the negativity he then only has one or two examples of how it should work. Thus real take home value is the final chapter.
Customer Rating:
Summary: From the Dashboard Trenches
Comment: I am actually in the process of creating a marketing dashboard for a Fortune 500 company. I am essentially the lead for this project and wanted to get up to speed in a hurry on the current thinking about dashboards and the visual display of data---this book has been very helpful.
Actually, I have really learned a great deal about what NOT to do when it comes to creating a dashboard.
Colors? No.
Pie Charts? Don't even think of 'em.
How about cool little gauges that look like the speedometer in your car? Please.
Author Stephen Few basically shoots down just about everything you ever thought you knew about what would constitute a good dashboard. What he emphasizes, time and again, is simplicity.
Taking his own advice, the book iteself is very simple and can be read in a few hours as most of its pages contain pictures of, well, examples of bad dashboard design.
My only criticism of the book is that there simply aren't enough examples of good dashboard design.
If you are working on a project that involves the visual display of data, then you should definitely read this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good information
Comment: It's a good book with good insight on what a dashboard is and isn't, which can help guide design heuristics and guidelines. Might be good to supplement it with an Edward Tufte book for more perspective on general information visualization.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great discussion on making useful displays of critical information
Comment: I've been poking through this book for the last several months as I've been starting to get my head around KPI and dashboard capabilities in SharePoint Server 2007. The book's a great bit on figuring out the best ways to concisely display critical summary information on a single screen for an at-a-glance overview.
The book's broken out into solid chapters covering dashboard history/background, uses, design mistakes, and the value of simplicity in dashboard content. The style of the book is clear, and it's concise and well-written. There's also great use of color which is terrific because so much of dashboards is about helping give quick visual impacts via smart use of colors.
The intro chapter gives a lot of examples of dashboards, but I found it disappointing in that it doesn't really lay out clear opinions on whether the author liked or disliked the boards. That weakness is limited to the first chapter, though, because the rest of the book does a great job of laying out problematic dashboards and talking about the fundamental issues behind those problems. Few hits a lot of common things like making dashboards which require scrolling to hit all the parts of a dashboard, or fragmenting dashboard content into multiple screens accessed through tabs.
Few's writing style is very clear, and he's got great insight into many details about what makes a good dashboard -- small details like prefering bar charts over pie charts in all but a few cases, or ensuring that you're setting the proper context for visual information.
I'm definitely not a great visual design guy, so this book's been a great help to me in thinking about how to best represent critical data. Frankly, I think the book's a great aid in helping figure out not just dashboards, but how to best represent any critical information in a clear fashion.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Basically just Tufte, but perfectly good anyway
Comment: (I've amended this review a bit in response to author Stephen Few's comment below. Few is correct: I shouldn't categorically state that ALL of the advice in the book can be found in Tufte. Much of it can, though Few adds good information about things like which graph type works with different types of data.)
I picked this up for free at a conference, so I haven't given this as close a read as if I'd shelled out my own cash for it. It seems to be a perfectly useful book on a very specific topic. However nearly all of the advice about creating usable and valuable information displays comes right out of Edward Tufte's books. All of Few's lessons, tips, and design pointers are basically the same advice you can get from Tufte's far more beautiful books. That's not necessarily bad, Few's book is less than half the price of any of Tufte's hardcover-only, private-press publications.
It's also too bad that Few couldn't find any examples of well-designed information dashboards. It's shocking, really: there is not a single screenshot in this book that isn't used as an example of what NOT to do. And some of them are so dreadful it boggles the mind, with horrible colors, strange gimmicky graphics, an endless use of the red-yellow-green traffic light metaphor and on and on. Apparently no designer has ever worked on any of these products.
|
|
|
