We’ve talked about exploration — learning new things about your data; and we’ve talked about presentation — teaching other people things abou

Visualization Genres: Monitoring and Dashboards

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2024-10-23 19:00:04

We’ve talked about exploration — learning new things about your data; and we’ve talked about presentation — teaching other people things about data. The third major genre of visualization is monitoring and dashboards —learning about new data in real time.

I’ll use the words “monitoring” (as the task) and “dashboard” (as the tool that we use to carry out the taxsk) somewhat interchangably. A dashboard is a set of fixed visualizations connected to live data, with the goal of letting a user have a consistent view of a standing question — and so, to monitor a situation.

The dashboard curator chooses a set of visualizations, backed by data queries. When a user looks at the dashboard, they see a recently-updated view.

Paradoxically, dashboards are perhaps the least-loved genre in the visualization world, yet the most used. Michael Correll has described them as “rude”; visualization researchers often dismiss them as uninteresting. They don’t come with the thrill of discovery, as exploratory visualization does; and they don’t encourage novel renderings, like presentations do.

Four dashboard exemplars showing different use cases. From Sarikaya et al's What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Dashboards? (IEEE VIS 2019).