Forum Discussion
Dashboard design feedback
Hello everyone,
a client asked me to come with for financial overview dashboard that show insights about expenses and revenue. They didnt provide certain measures. Any feedback is appreciated. Including rating x/10, extra measures ideas, layout tweaks.
Thanks!
Nice looking report. It has a clean color palette and good KPI hierarchy.
For better readability, I’d suggest shortening the month labels to “Jan, Feb, Mar…” instead of full names to reduce visual clutter and avoid rotated text. Also consider applying Gestalt / SCRAP design principles, improve spacing between elements, keep metric colors consistent across visuals, align charts more tightly, and group related items by proximity. That will make the layout feel cleaner and easier to scan.
Have a nice day!
8 Replies
Hi your visuals are a good starting point for the report development.
Here are a few best practices to consider:- Place the most important metrics (e.g., revenue, profit, cost) that you want the user to focus on immediately in the top row.
- The trend and composition visualizations should occupy the middle row.
- Detailed information, such as tables or matrices, should be at the bottom or accessible via a drill-through.
- Use red, green, or amber to clearly indicate positive or negative aspects.
- Place the visuals in Z order, left-to-right approach: place the most important metrics on the left and the least important on the right (as human eyes are trained this way).
- Use the dashboard real estate wisely, including some white space; black backgrounds are not typically used in enterprise dashboards.
- Abbreviate the month names and use a horizontal orientation instead of slanting.
- Use positive and negative shading to display month-to-month growth.
- The dual-axis chart's percentage is not properly formatted.
- Slicers are currently missing.
Thanks
Thank you. Very valuable feedback especially "Use positive and negative shading to display month-to-month growth"
Nice looking report. It has a clean color palette and good KPI hierarchy.
For better readability, I’d suggest shortening the month labels to “Jan, Feb, Mar…” instead of full names to reduce visual clutter and avoid rotated text. Also consider applying Gestalt / SCRAP design principles, improve spacing between elements, keep metric colors consistent across visuals, align charts more tightly, and group related items by proximity. That will make the layout feel cleaner and easier to scan.
Have a nice day!Such an incredible advice, I will read more about Gestalt principles. Thanks you
Hi Fabricadabra , Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Community Forum.
We find the answers shared by Natarajan_M , RicardoTraNa & RicardoTraNa are correct. Can you please confirm if the solution worked for you. It will help others with similar issues find the answer easily.
Thank you NoosaInsight , RicardoTraNa & Natarajan_M for your valuable response.
Done
Hi Fabricadabra, I love that you've kept the focus of the dashboard simple, it's not overcrowded and focuses on just a few important metrics. Great!
You've received some valuable feedback from Natarajan_M already, so these are just a couple thoughts:
- Bump up the saturation - While many wouldn't mind the dark background, the colours used in any label and visual will need to contrast enough to be read without strain. Try using lighter shades of green or blue with more saturation.
- Keep naming consisent - For example, "Monthly income" should be "Monthly Income" to be consistent with the rest of the report.
- Align titles - The title on the pie chart is slightly overlapping the chart.
- Fonts - Some charts use different fonts to the rest of the dashboard. Try to keep it consistent.
- Possible additional metrics - You might want to also analyse expense category growth over time, and possibly highlight which expense category had the highest growth from previous month.
- Creativity with styles - I'd say add your own flavour to things a bit. Play around with colours and rounded corners.
In three words: consistency, contrast, creativity!
Hi Fabricadabra , Hope you are doing well. Kindly let us know if the issue has been resolved or if further assistance is needed. Your input could be helpful to others in the community.
