Real-time dashboards provide a single view to the most important performance metrics for an organization. Data exploration takes a back-seat to a focus on monitoring trends and progress to goals. Real-time dashboards show up on big screens in call centers, monitors in marketing departments, or the desk of a fictitious Private Equity titan on the TV show ‘Billions’.

Parallel coordinates is a visualization technique used to plot individual data elements across many performance measures. Each of the measures corresponds to a vertical axis and each data element is displayed as a series of connected points along the measure/axes.

Less is often more when designing your data visualizations. Here are ten lessons we've learned about how to better communicate with data. The key: give readers less information to absorb.

Here’s an analytics truism: everyone wants a dashboard (a.k.a. key performance indicators (a.k.a KPIs), success metrics, scorecards). Managers want a barometer of performance, a hammer to use on their subordinates, and a straightforward quantification of their business. Below are a few of the guidelines we use when we take on this task:

(With enough visualization methods to warrant a periodic table, it can be confusing to know what to use and when—and which visualizations are even worth considering at all. This series of posts is intended to introduce you to the visualization approaches that we find most useful, practical, and audience-friendly.)

Have you ever thought about why you deliver a presentation versus sending a report?  Let’s face it – reports are easier. They don’t require coordinating schedules or reserving meeting spaces and preparing information for reports is far less labor intensive than pulling together the content required for a quality presentation.

Conventional wisdom says that an executive dashboard must fit on a single page or screen. The argument hinges on a pair of assertions about this constraint: it provides necessary discipline to focus on only the most critical information; and it enables the audience to see results "at a glance."

In the information visualization world, treemaps are on the rise…and justifiably so. Treemaps simultaneously show the big picture, comparisons of related items, and allow easy navigation to the details.

Misaligned goals, distorted behaviors, and a misguided sense of success... no, I’m not referring to college graduates. I’m talking about the problems caused by using the wrong metrics in your organization. You’ve probably seen examples like tracking average customer profitability and losing perspective on the variance in profitability or evaluating customer service reps on calls handled without regard for the quality of the experience. I’d like to offer up a quick-bake recipe for choosing the right metric.