Accessing crucial data on your fingertips through responsive dashboards is valuable for making informed decisions that lead to business growth.
Dashboards are all about quick glances into easy to read single pages with real time user interfaces. But does the inertia of your fast-paced life allow you to access business dashboards only from laptops and desktops? Stephen Hawking says, “We are all connected by the internet like neurons in a giant brain.” And if you realise you need to view dashboards on your mobiles and tablets often when you have stepped out of office. Therefore, for a seamless navigation and comprehension of data on these handheld devices, it is imperative that you adopt a responsive web design that re-sizes your KPI dashboards according to the screen resolution of the devices used.
Enter responsive dashboards.
As the name suggests, responsive KPI dashboards respond to the devices used by you and display the suitable versions.
How do they help you?
- They accommodate all the information in one screen and keep the scroll to a minimum without hampering your user experience.
- They send real time alerts on your mobile or email, when the configured metric behaves abnormally.
- They showcase your latest data clearly.
- They help you drag, move and resize widgets.
- They help create and edit reports, performance analytics, and other widgets directly from the dashboard.
- You can use the add widget pane to quickly find and preview widgets to add to the business dashboard.
- The contents of the dashboard can be edited, and the modifications can be applied universally as you can easily share these dashboards from the integrated sharing pane.
- Dashboards set as your Home, let you access frequently used information.
But since there is a flipside to everything and responsive dashboards are not an exception either.
These are the limitations:
- Your existing KPI dashboards cannot be converted to responsive dashboards.
- Responsive dashboard tabs cannot be changed to homepages, but you can set one entire business dashboard as your ‘Home’
- While using UI11, Internet Explorer 7 and 8 do not support responsive dashboards.
About the design:
You also need to be mindful while designing business dashboards that are consistent across different screen resolutions. An effective design would mean not overcrowding the dashboard with too many data points but picking only the relevant ones and displaying those for ease of visibility.
Responsive business dashboards are like ‘one size fits all’. They are a simple answer to the complications of accessing a multitude of data with ease on your fingertips. And the trade-off is timely, informed decisions.