May Edition: Designing Usable Dashboards
How to build tools that inspire good decisions
Dashboards address—and ideally, prevent—the waste of good data. They’ve become a crucial medium for data scientists who want to share the product of their hard work, and for other stakeholders who need to make data-informed business and product decisions. Many obstacles remain, though, on the road to successful collaboration: how do you decide what information to share, and how to organize it? How do you stop your sleek dashboard from falling off the radar of your non-DS colleagues?
We’ve selected several recent posts that patiently explain the theory and practice of developing dashboards that people actually use, and that tackle some of the common challenges data professionals encounter while creating them. For those of you who’d like to explore other topics, read on to discover our most popular posts of the past month, as well as some original features we’re very proud of.
Happy reading, and thank you for your support of our authors’ work,
TDS Editors Highlights
- How to Build Effective (and Useful) Dashboards
Marie Lefevre introduces a streamlined, four-step approach to building dashboards, and anchors it in her own real-world experience. (March 2022, 7 minutes) - The Dos and Don’ts of Dashboard Design
Approaching the topic from a more hands-on, design-informed angle, Payal Patel defines clear principles that will ensure others can use your dashboard to generate actionable insights. (March 2022, 7 minutes) - Advancing to Professional Dashboard with Python, Using Dash
If you’re already an experienced dashboard creator, consider pushing your skills further by following Kay Jan Wong’s concise, step-by-step tutorial. (January 2022, 6 minutes) - Creating a Better Dashboard with Python, Dash, and Plotly
For anyone who’s taking their first steps with dashboards, Brad Bartram’s guide is particularly thorough—it will walk you through the entire process from the ground up. (December 2021, 16 minutes)
Original Features
From author Q&As to podcast episodes, our team publishes new articles every week with the latest news and ideas from our thriving community. Here are several recent highlights, in case you missed them:
- “In Machine Learning, Failure and Uncertainty Are Sometimes Necessary Ingredients for Success,” our interview with Ani Madurkar.
- The More You Write, the Better You Are at Explaining Your Work: a conversation with Dr. Varshita Sher about her career path and writing strategy.
- Generating Wikipedia Articles with AI, a fascinating conversation on the TDS podcast, featuring host Jeremie Harris and AI researcher Angela Fan.
- Finding Beauty Behind All the Math, the latest in our Author Spotlight series, featuring Hannah Roos.
Popular Posts
One should never discount the wisdom of crowds—especially when the crowd in question is you, our sharp and loyal TDS readers. Here are some of the most-read posts of the past month.
- How to Structure a Data Science Project for Readability and Transparency, by Khuyen Tran
- You Should Use This to Visualize SQL Joins Instead of Venn Diagrams, by Andreas Martinson
- The 5 Best Data Science Books You Should Read in 2022, by Terence Shin
- How to Self-Study All The Technical Stuff You Need for Data Science, by Frank Andrade
- Becoming a “Real” Data Analyst, by Cassie Kozyrkov
- I’m a Self-Taught Data Scientist. Here Are My 3 Suggestions for Newcomers, by Soner Yıldırım
Before we sign off, please join us in extending a very warm welcome to some of the new authors we welcomed in April and whose work we’re thrilled to share with you. (If you’d like to join their ranks, we’d love to hear from you.) They include Adrienne Kline, Riccardo Andreoni, Aine Fairbrother-Browne, William Foote, Mario Namtao Shianti Larcher, Boriharn K, John Willcox, Ali Soleymani, Veronica Villa, Carlo H, Alifia Ghantiwala, Roshan Nayak, Frank Liu, Yash Salvi, Ransaka Ravihara, Jordi TORRES.AI, Aydin Schwartz, Sankar Srinivasan, Kishan Manani, Hanzala Qureshi, Tara Prole, Ariel Jiang, Bijil Subhash, Sascha Kirch, Dan Pietrow, David Harar, Susmit, Mintao Wei, Alex Thach, Spencer Goble, Anthony Rotio, Charlotte Tu, Jack Chih-Hsu Lin, Pieter Steyn, Joe Sasson, Anushka Gupta, Louis Casanave, Robin Thibaut, Mario Hayashi, Maya Murad, Matteo Courthoud, and Cristiana de Azevedo von Stosch.
