Why do I still love the field of data visualisation after 20 years? It’s the levers that exist between form and function, beauty and insight, opinionated or neutral. These levers create an endless creative tension that is enriching to apply, observe and discuss.
As a co-author of The Big Book Of Dashboards and Dashboards That Deliver (released in September 2025!) I’ve spent countless hours deliberating how to apply those tensions to things we call “dashboards” and other “business analytics” apps.
The Information Is Beautiful Awards (IIBA), happening in June, can provide inspiration for those of us building business dashboards. Before we can explore, one elephant in the room is how to define a “dashboard”.
In our books, we define a dashboard as “a visual display of data used to monitor conditions and/or facilitate understanding.” It’s intentionally short, vague, and open to interpretation. Rather than focus on semantics, our advice is to focus on the goals of using data for decision-making:
- Who is your audience? What level of detail and aggregation do they need?
- What is their goal? What is the data-driven decision they are trying to make?
- In what format do they need the insights delivered?
- How can this be designed so they can succeed in as short a time as possible?
We explore this in great detail in Dashboards That Deliver. For now, let’s look at the IIBA history for inspiration.
The “business analytics” category, which first appeared in the awards in 2022, might be a good place to start:
Voilà’s winner is undeniably beautiful. It is “business analytics”, too: it’s a visualisation of 12 months of project work done by this information design company. But I would publish this as a dashboard? Heck, no. The data is abstracted in the pursuit of beauty rather than accuracy. Great stuff by Voilà, but terrible for a poor CEO trying to decide on a business decision.
We can look right across the spectrum of winners for useful approaches. The 2014 Silver Winner, “OECD Regional Well-Being” by Mauritz Stefaner and Dr Susanne Jaschko is a great example:
The arrangement of KPIs in a table in the lower half of this visual is very useful. It provide a lot of information in a simple grid. It’s easy to read and easy to compare. The interactivity is balanced well, and colour is used to add functionality as well as aesthetic beauty. From a purist perspective, I would argue that the radial bars are not ideal. They look great, but a bar chart would be easier to decode. This is not a criticism of the work, it’s an example of how I might take inspiration from IIBA winners and rethink them for a business purpose.
Finally, what’s the Gold-winning entry I go to every time I teach data communication? Which one captures the challenge of the business dashboard designer: the need to think about balancing the levers of visual design?
It’s the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases charts by Dov Friedman and Tynan DeBold from 2015:
The chart shows the prevalence of measles across the US between 1930 and 2013. Each row represents one US state and each column is one year. The colour shows the number of measles cases. The black line shows when the measles vaccine was introduced.
The insight is instant: the vaccine all but eradicated the disease.
Why is this my favourite? When it was published, people initially raved about these charts until someone said “It should have been a line chart. A line chart would tell the story faster.” Right there is the tension we face in business dashboards. Sure, I could have shown this as a line chart. But then I would have lost the detail of measle prevalence in each US state. It’s our job, when designing for our business users, to make these calls: do they want the minimum information, aggregated as far as possible? Or do they want the detail? I could never tell you the right answer: it depends on what your users want.
These are just three examples from hundreds of shortlisted entries. When I’m building business dashboards my goal is to give my audience the right info, in the right format, so that they can make decisions as fast as possible. I seek to make my dashboards beautiful as well as functional. Browsing the IIBA history, it’s inspiring to see examples I can use in the pursuit of this goal.
Written by Andy Cotgreave, Senior Data Evangelist at Tableau.
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