Dashboards—they’re the face of your analysis, the interface of your business. They help you organize and visualize your data and most importantly customize how you present intelligence to different stakeholders. They reveal valuable insights at a glance, keep you informed, and can chart your next steps to success. They ultimately serve the purpose of keeping everyone in the organization on the same page.
But dashboards are also a great way to strengthen your brand. Whether you’re working with a BI or an AI dashboard, its design and functionality provide the prime opportunity for brand building and promoting consistency in how your company is perceived—internally and externally.
A strong brand offers more than just competitive advantage. It leaves a memorable impression on both your customers and users, and it teaches them what to expect. With effectively branded dashboards, you are able to bolster your company identity, promote ease of use, and even positively impact organizational culture.
The importance of visualization
Before we get into the nitty gritty of branding dashboards, let’s talk about visualization and its role in analytics first. When you think about reporting, the more traditional business intelligence probably comes to mind first. But reporting actually plays a huge role in advanced analytics as well: machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence.
Dashboards often offer a consolidated view of different business metrics through a real-time KPI summary. They tell you what’s happening in terms of customer churn, employee productivity, maintenance activity, equipment usage—whatever it is your company wants to keep track of. Interactive dashboards take this a step further, allowing you to drill down into micro level details of information.
However, this sea of information and insights available can be paralyzing. Businesses need a more sophisticated way to visualize all this data, a better way to take in this information. This is where AI analytics and the AI-powered dashboards come in. Not only do you get insights from different data sources in real time, but you also get automatic alerts, valuable forecasts, and recommendations and prescriptions. This way, you can identify trends in real time and get insights that will help you remedy problems ahead of time and bank on opportunities sooner.
No matter the foundation of your analysis—business intelligence or advanced analytics—dashboards are an integral aspect of the process, making it all the more important to optimize them for your organization.
Establishing your brand with dashboards
Here are some things to keep in mind:
1. Know exactly what your brand identity is.
For any brand building project, the first step is to get a clear idea of what you want to exude. That means familiarizing yourself with your company: what products and services it offers, what its overall objectives are, even what its culture is like. Essentially, learn how employees and clients currently perceive it.
From here, you can isolate the important aspects of your brand personality and tie it together to determine how you want to present your brand—and dashboards—visually.
2. Aim for uniformity and consistency.
The key to effective branding is consistency. Now this doesn’t just mean plastering your company logo over all your dashboards. It also means choosing a color palette and sticking to it, and using consistent fonts and graphic styling.
To kick things up a notch though, you should also implement consistent visual management. This means making dashboards easier to digest and lessening confusion by keeping certain visual aspects uniform. This is especially significant for reports that are viewed on a regular basis. If you keep certain sections in the same place and use consistent colors for health indicators (for example, gray for low and green for high), users will be able to find the information needed much faster.
3. Know your target audience.
There are two things you need to consider when optimizing your dashboards for branding: design and functionality. This is one of the reasons why building dashboards are so challenging. More than just making the design consistent, you should also make sure they are functional in a way that makes sense to the end user: executives, business managers, or even other data scientists.
For example, if you’re building a prediction dashboard for a hospital administrator that forecasts when a patient is at risk of readmission, make sure to set up alerts that are easy to understand, preferably ones that show up as natural language.
Or if you’re building a sales summary dashboard for your CFO, make sure to build well-designed drill-down paths and simple navigation. With a tailored report, the executive can easily find the root cause and get actionable insights for critical decision making.
Dashboards are here to stay
Despite what some people think, the age of AI doesn’t mean the death of dashboards. In fact, the growth of analytics just means the advent of the modern dashboard: intelligent, user-friendly, and chock-full of information to help users meet business goals.
So, take advantage of its role as a vehicle of insights—use the data analytics dashboard to bolster your brand identity and provide a better user experience for your employees, customers, and clients.
