Dashboard Design Patterns

TL;DR

This paper presents a systematic review of dashboard design patterns, categorizing common solutions and discussing their application in various dashboard genres to guide designers and researchers.

Contribution

It introduces eight groups of dashboard design patterns based on a review of 144 dashboards and demonstrates their application through a participatory design workshop.

Findings

Identified eight key design pattern groups for dashboards

Provided insights into pattern combinations for different dashboard genres

Discussed design tradeoffs and challenges in dashboard creation

Abstract

This paper introduces design patterns for dashboards to inform dashboard design processes. Despite a growing number of public examples, case studies, and general guidelines there is surprisingly little design guidance for dashboards. Such guidance is necessary to inspire designs and discuss tradeoffs in, e.g., screenspace, interaction, or information shown. Based on a systematic review of 144 dashboards, we report on eight groups of design patterns that provide common solutions in dashboard design. We discuss combinations of these patterns in dashboard genres such as narrative, analytical, or embedded dashboard. We ran a 2-week dashboard design workshop with 23 participants of varying expertise working on their own data and dashboards. We discuss the application of patterns for the dashboard design processes, as well as general design tradeoffs and common challenges. Our work complements previous surveys and aims to support dashboard designers and researchers in co-creation, structured design decisions, as well as future user evaluations about dashboard design guidelines. Detailed pattern descriptions and workshop material can be found online: https://dashboarddesignpatterns.github.io