How A Well-Designed Dashboard Can Save Your Business Time And Human Resources
No matter your business’s specialization, it processes tons of input daily. Sales, interactions with customers, marketing — all this produces data and gives rise to two big issues. First, it’s usually unobvious how to make this data visible. You know it exists but it’s really difficult to have it clearly presented in one place. Second, it’s challenging to make it work for you — that is, to give you insights, which you could use to make smarter decisions. Dashboards are instruments that help to address both these issues.
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What Exactly Dashboards Do For Your Business
Real-Time Data Access
One of the biggest dashboard benefits is real-time data access. Even if you have a person responsible for collecting and presenting data, the key issue is that it takes time. When they finally cope with it, the data is not exactly irrelevant but not super fresh either. This can affect the quality of your decisions.
And vice versa, if you have access to real-time data, your decisions are swifter and smarter. For example, you notice a drop in sales. You start investigating asap, right? This is much more promising than when you wait until the end of the month to find out about the problem and only then start acting. Based on what research tells us, real-time data access may offer a 20-25% improvement in performance.
Enhanced Data Visualization
So having access to data is cool but it’s also important that you can easily understand what you see. Figma dashboard templates are super helpful here. There are lots of adjustable components for turning complex data into easy-to-understand visualizations. App bars, badges, calendars, cards, lists, pickers, snack bars, tabs, and so on and so forth.
The benefits of dashboards in terms of enhanced visualization don’t need many explanations. A good dashboard design shows you trends, patterns, anomalies, and a lot more. You may be surprised how much info you used to overlook.
Improved Decision-Making
There are thus the advantages of dashboards related to data presentation. And thanks to them, you make smarter decisions. You can compare and analyze data. You can see which of your solutions works and which is useless.
For example, a marketing dashboard can show you which campaigns are delivering the best ROI. You now know where to allocate resources. Similarly, you know which costs can be cut.
Enhanced Collaboration
The two benefits of dashboard reporting in real time are that everyone sees the same data and that no one spends time on sharing data. The latter is particularly important. You know it yourself how much time is usually spent on exchanging updates with people from different departments. With dashboards, this can be skipped.
How to Choose a Dashboard
- Understand Business Problems
So you know the benefits of using dashboards and now need to determine how they correlate with your business’s problems. Simply put, you need to have a clear idea of what problems you’ll solve.
- Formulate Hypotheses
Develop hypotheses based on your understanding of the problems. That is, speculate upon what underpins the problem and what will solve it.
- Validate Hypotheses
Examine your data to validate these hypotheses. The key task here is to understand if you’re focusing on the right metrics and that your hypotheses are grounded in reality.
- Design KPIs
KPIs must be directly related to your validated hypotheses. They must be specific, measurable, and aligned with your business goals.
- Design and Create Dashboards
Finally, use all this knowledge to design a dashboard (or a couple of ones) that will track your KPIs. They must be user-friendly and visually appealing.
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The biggest change that has happened in business is that the pace of decisions has increased dramatically. You don’t have the luxury of thinking things over for a week or two anymore. You must decide asap because that’s what your competitors do. And that’s exactly why dashboards are so helpful.
FAQs
How often should a business update its dashboards?
Ideally, you’d want them to be updated in real time, especially if you work in e-commerce or stock trading. Even if you don’t, real-time (or, at least, daily) updates are good.
Can dashboards be customized for different departments?
Absolutely! You choose a suitable Figma template and customize it. For a sales dashboard, you’ll focus on lead conversion rates, for example. And for an HR dashboard, you’ll design it to highlight employee performance or recruitment statistics.
How do you ensure data accuracy in dashboards?
First of all, you validate the data. Then, you strive to automate its collection. And you should conduct regular (preferably frequent) audits.