The world is getting more data-driven every single day. Everyone wants to make more informed decisions based on data and not on gut feeling, and as such, dashboards are becoming ever more important. They convert tons of data into easily identifiable trends and patterns using charts that make sense to the naked eye.
This holds particularly true for web apps. Designing great reports and dashboards that help users make informed business decisions in quick time is increasingly becoming an aspect that can differentiate your web app from your competitor’s.
Here are 2 web apps that you could seek inspiration and learn best practices from when you are developing your web apps’ dashboard.
LinkedIn needs no introduction. The world’s largest professional network has reports for a bunch of its tools, including its Group Statistics.
This is one of the cleanest dashboards you will ever see. It splits the metrics into 4 tabs to break the info into digestible chunks, and mentions the top performers explicitly to give you a quick summary. They then add further detail and context to data using tooltips to display more information about a particular dataset.
ClickTale
ClickTale is a Web Analytics tool that that provides businesses with insights into their customers’ online behavior.
Their dashboard shows the most critical components upfront — Heatmaps, Search Recordings, Visitor Recordings, Conversion Funnel and Visitor Geolocations — and then you can drill-down into any of them for a closer look.
Want these reports for yourself?
While creating the right dashboard is a detailed process, it can be a lot simpler if you pick the right charting components. That is where FusionCharts, our sponsor this week, comes in. It is the charting partner for LinkedIn and ClickTale, and calls itself JavaScript charting for the grown-ups.
FusionCharts’ charts render seamlessly on all devices (PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Android devices) and browsers (including IE 6, 7 and 8). It takes just 15 minutes to create a chart and just a couple of hours to set up advanced reporting features like clickable legends, drill-down, export to PNG/JPEG/PDF, tooltips, visual data editing and more. The suite comes with 90+ chart types and 950+ maps, extensive documentation and plug-and-play dashboard demos. They also have a jQuery charting plugin.
All in all, it is used by 21,000 organizations and 450,000 developers, including some of the web’s most popular apps and a majority of Fortune 500 companies. It’s even being used at the Stanford Research Institute to design their workstation of the future. So why not use it to power the charts in your own app? Download a copy and try it out today.