In order for a dashboard to gain traction among users, it must visually flag metrics in order to draw users’ attention to metrics that require it. Unfortunately, though, the most common methods of flagging metrics on dashboards (“Vs. previous period,” “Single-threshold flags,” “% deviation from target flags,” and “Good/Satisfactory/Poor ranges”) are prone to several problems: they often flag metrics that don’t require attention, fail to flag metrics that do, and can be slow to visually scan. In this post, I discuss the “four-threshold” method that I now use, since it doesn’t have these shortcomings.

This post is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Practical Dashboards, and is the seventh in an eight-part series of posts on how to determine which metrics to visually flag on a dashboard.

This excerpt from my upcoming book, Practical Dashboards, is the sixth in an eight-part series on how to determine which metrics to visually flag on a dashboard (i.e., with alert dots, different-colored text, etc.) in order to draw attention to metrics that require it. In this post, I look at the “Good/Satisfactory/Poor” method used on many dashboards. While not as problematic as the “vs. previous period,” “single-threshold,” or “% deviation from target” methods that I discussed in previous posts, this method still has several serious drawbacks that become obvious when pointed out. In the next post in this series, I’ll introduce a more useful approach called “four-threshold” visual flags.

This excerpt from my upcoming book, Practical Dashboards, is the fifth in an eight-part series on determining which metrics to visually flag on a dashboard (i.e., with alert dots, different-colored text, etc.) in order to draw attention to metrics that require it. In this post, I look at what I call the “% deviation from target” method of flagging metrics on a dashboard. I explain why, despite seeming like an improvement upon single-threshold flags, and being used on many dashboards, “% deviation from target” flags can easily mislead. In a later post in this series, I’ll introduce a more useful way to flag metrics on dashboards called the “four-threshold” method.

This excerpt from my upcoming book, Practical Dashboards, is the fourth in an eight-part series on determining which metrics to visually flag on a dashboard (i.e., with alert dots, different-colored text, etc.) in order to draw attention to metrics that require it. In this post, I look at the “single-threshold” method of determining which metrics to flag and why, despite being extremely common, this method has several major drawbacks that become obvious when pointed out. In a later post in this series, I introduce a more useful approach called “four-threshold” visual flags.