Monday, 14 May 2012

7 Principles of Information Design

Effective Dashboards are based on the principles of Information Design; Ineffective dashboards, which often look like flashy car dashboards, play well to company CEOs but are unfortunately operationally unusable and are not designed using these principles.

Here are 7 key principles of Information Design according to Stephen Few, a pioneer in this area:
  1. Display neither more nor less than what is relevant to your message.
  2. Do not include visual differences in a graph that do not correspond to actual differences in the data.
  3. Use the lengths or 2-D locations of objects to encode quantitative values in graphs.
  4. Differences in the visual properties that represent values should accurately correspond to the actual differences in the values they represent.
  5. Do not visually connect values that are discrete, thereby suggesting a relationship that does not exist in the data.
  6. Make the information that is most important to your message more visually salient in a graph than information that is less important.
  7. Augment people’s short-term memory by combining multiple facts into a single visual pattern that can be stored as a chunk of memory and by presenting all the information they need to compare within eye span.
Credit: CORE DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR DISPLAYING QUANTITATIVE INFORMATION by Stephen Few, 2006


Ken Thompson (aka The BumbleBee) blogs about bioteams, virtual collaboration and business simulation at www.bioteams.com.
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