Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Very informative
Comment: Excellent resource to provide guidance on information dashboard design. Not a step-by-step book, nor a recipe book. I found it very useful in initiating discussions on the subject with management. Would highly recommend!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Should read
Comment: A should read for all dashboard designers as well as software engineers, who are programming all those new flashy features into their dashboard tools.
Forget all the speedometers, pie charts, and 3-d charts and focus on conveying the message in a clear & concise format instead.
Focus on the message and not colorful, but distracting dashboards.
This book covers a lot of design fundamentals with a lot of examples. It does not cover how to select the KPIs to be displayed, but how to display KPIs, once they are chosen.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Information Dashboard Design
Comment: This book primarily deals with what the title says. Dashboards. I was not aware ofthe complexity and breadth of this type of interface, but since it is not a forte I usually provide to clients, the book was an interesting read.
Way back when I got into digital work, I first learnt as a programmer and put together simple applications. Even then, it was really the program that allowed the interface to be built and dictated what and how things were displayed. Today, one can customize an interface for dashboard software, be it tied through a network, RIA, or some other data stream. There are simple rules to follow and key learnings that this book can translate to other design realms.
Had a client choose your worst mock? Been there - done that. This books best advice is simple. Choose the best design that fits the needs of your clients and present that. The rest of the advice and as to why, you should find out for yourself.
Well worth the money. Suitable for all designers to get a different perspective on interfaces and a couch jumper for those who are managing reporting systems for clients (inhouse or not).
Appeal to software architects, interface designers and other designers such as web, RIA, DVD or interested parties. Not relevant to the print crowd too much.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Comment: I had high hopes when picking up this book. In the end I found little of use. Perhaps I was looking for more than an approach that was business oriented. Information displays for systems monitoring are a topic almost completely missed in the book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Important Resource For Dashboard Designers/Developers
Comment: What is a dashboard?
No, I don't mean the dashboard of an automobile, but rather the dashboard as it relates to computers and people that use them. Quite simply, a dashboard is like an overview. It's a screen or a web page that displays relevant important content all in one handy place. Instead of having to click from one content area to the other, a user can quickly glance at a dashboard and gather all sorts of useful info without having to perform a lot of navigation. If you are a user of Quicken or Microsoft Money you will be very familiar with dashboards. These applications have used this technique for a long time, providing important financial information such as bills that are due or where money is going... information that you would like to be front and center, not having to click all over the place to get a quick snapshot of the data you want to see.
What Stephen Few does in this book is provide the reader with a fantastic way to look at dashboards. Learn how to avoid mistakes such as making the user have to scroll when that is exactly NOT what you want them to do, providing information that isn't relevant, and/or using meters when graphs or charts would be more applicable. With a nice size to the book, vibrant colors, and great examples, this is a book that provides wonderful suggestions on how to improve design so that developers can create dashboards which are slick, smooth, and most of all... EFFICIENT.
If you are designing or developing a dashboard to serve as an informational tool for your users or is the central focus point of what you are working on, you would be very wise to pick up 'Information Dashboard Design' to get the job done and done right.
**** RECOMMENDED
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