how do you tell a story with a dashboard speaking my advice would be that you shouldn't dashboards often house multiple graphs in a single view they include filters which allow you to drill down and understand different levels of detail they're fantastic tools for exploratory analysis in fact a well-designed dashboard is going to help you make sense of what is a lot of data quite quickly and understand those important insights now the challenge arises when you then try to communicate those important insights to someone else maybe you try to present with your dashboard so you take a screenshot of the specific view you paste it into a slide after all the dashboard helped you understand the data so shouldn't it help someone else unfortunately it often doesn't work that way keep in mind that a dashboard is built to explore it wasn't intended to explain having multiple graphs in a single view actually makes it challenging for somebody else to spot the key takeaways and because dashboards rarely include context your audience is also forced to make assumptions to connect the dots today I'm going to show you an example of how I would transform an exploratory dashboard into something that's better suited for the explanatory space I'm going to demonstrate this two ways the first redesign is going to be quick and dirty works well when you're limited on time second is going to be much more robust now to do this I'll be using my favorite test the where are your eyes drawn test this is going to help me decide what I need to change in the original dashboard and to make sure that I've done so successfully now if you want to learn more about the where are your eyes drawn test I recommend checking out this video that's just appeared or I've also linked a more detailed explanation in the description down below let's go ahead and Jump Right In now the dashboard that I will use is a sales performance dashboard from a pharmaceutical company and it takes a look at how the company's main antibiotic doxofoxin compares to other treatment options on the market comparing that sales performance between the retail sector and the non-retail sector now I'm sure whoever built this dashboard knows exactly what they're meant to see when they look at this but for me when I look at this things are a little less intuitive now to help guide me in my redesigns I'm going to start with a quick where are your eyes drawn test I'll start by looking away and then glancing back and I'm taking notice of where my eyes go first as well as where my eyes go next or in other words how I process the page I've done this test a few times and I find that each time I do so my eyes are drawn immediately to a different area sometimes I look at the line chart on the left other times the title catches my attention first the blue headers in the table they're super attention grabbing but other times I find that I'm drawn to the white space that exists in the line graph on the right this all tells me that I don't have a clear focal point in this dashboard now in terms of where my eyes go next I'm not exactly sure how to describe this I guess they go everywhere really depends where I look first essentially they're sort of bouncing all over the page until I mentally force myself to focus in on a graph and try and figure out what's going on here right make some assumptions about what that key takeaway might be given that we've gathered all of this information we're now ready to start making some changes so let's go ahead and get started with makeover number one let's focus attention on a single graph I'm going to make that chart larger and less easier to read and the first thing we should aim to do is simply establish a clear focal point and the easiest way to do that is to adjust our use of color so instead of using Color to categorize let's use color sparingly to draw attention where we want it so I've done this by simply de-emphasizing all of the competitive data making those lines gray and then keeping the color for the doxofoxin line now we can go beyond just focusing attention and also clarifying to someone else why they're looking at that specific line and so I've done that by just putting the point of this graph in words and putting them directly on the page in this case in the title of the graph now we can come back to the busy dashboard and we can replace that colorful line graph on the left with our targeted visual we can apply the exact same strategy to each of the other elements focusing attention by using Color sparingly and then adding some words to clarify why somebody is looking there now is this redesign perfect absolutely not but it'll do in a pinch you can imagine a scenario where if this was on a screen and maybe somebody else the analyst was there to talk through it and lend context and that combination of the analyst words as well as the focused attention on the visual can certainly help paint a deeper understanding for an audience but if this dashboard was meant to stand on its own then I'd argue that we probably need to add even more context on the page but it's going to be hard to do so given how much space is already taken up so in that case we're going to want to start to pull out the key information and craft something that is better intended to stand on its own so almost any time I need to create a standalone document in a business setting I find myself creating a summary slide also sometimes known as an executive summary and almost 90 percent of the time when I'm creating a summary slide I find myself using one of two layouts it's that side-by-side layout that's going to work well that's because in this scenario we have retail data and we have non-retail data so once I've selected the template that I'm going to use it's a matter of just pulling out the data from the dashboard plugging it into this template and then outlining what my analysis is what my thoughts are and so if we start first with the context the words that need to go on the page I'm going to begin by updating the slide Title Here in this case I'm going to update the slide title to Good News trans return to normal as supply chain issues resolve so I've outlined some additional details toward the top I've also put some text at the bottom considering what do I want my audience to do once they digest this information I want them to start discussing what are the next steps do we need to make changes to safeguard our Organization for future supply chain issues the next step is to Simply add the data so I'm going to take those line charts from the dashboard format them and plug them into the summary slide I've made some changes made sure that I'm still focusing attention crafting that clear focal point also added some data markers and annotation to indicate where the supply chain issues first occurred you'll notice in the retail graph on the left hand side I opted not to include the competitive data this maybe made sense in the dashboard but because there was such a broad range of values it actually made it very hard to see the decline that was taking place for doxofoxin now I can do a quick final where are your eyes drawn test and realize that maybe I want to add some bold facing to Simply make this dense document a little bit easier to scan so I've shared two different ways that we can take the exploratory dashboard and turn it into an explanatory communication one that does a better job at passing the where your eyes drawn test are there other topics or examples that you'd like to see featured in this makeover series let me know in the comments down below and I should just mention for those of you watching around the time of publishing we're actually featuring The where your eyes drawn test in our community challenge this month so if you've got some content that could benefit from a redesign and you want to put this where your eyes drawn tests to work highly recommend you do so I've put some details and a link down below if you're interested in participating and if you want to Simply watch more dashboard Transformations or other where your eyes drawn makeovers check out one of these two videos my name is Alex and I'll see you next time