This book is very nicely written in easy to understand manner. The format and layout of the content itself communicates importance of visual aspects at core.
Usage of colors and presentation of data are eye openers for BI Professionals like me. I mean, most of these years after seeing all those animated charts and sweet looking dashboards (from all big BI vendors), the real meaning was somewhere had been lost. I think this book is must read for everyone who needs to present data, and not only for people who design Dashboard.
THIS IS PRACTICAL!

Really interesting book...especially if you are looking around to find sth like this...I was really lost in looking for dashboards, but this book made an impact. I propose it to anyone that has any relationship with dashboards!!

This is a good book for those who need a better understanding of what constitutes a quality (visual) information dashboard. It doesn't get bogged down in useless details, focusing instead on the primary design factors (e.g. use of grapics, layout and space, text typeface and emphasis) which will help you to create a USEFUL and used info dashboard. The book itself is well designed (as one would expect) and the author's tone is casual and concise. Ample illustrations and images provide examples of the Dos and Don'ts so you can readily understand the design guidelines the author advocates.

Most of the book focuses on the visual aspects of info presentation with some useful forays into areas such as proper requirements/measurements gathering and different user types. Little of the book is on the "back-end" or deep business needs/uses of informational dashboards.

I think the book is well written, wise, and should be required reading for any developer who finds themselves working on an information dashboard or other data presentation project. Readers looking for more business case background or data-wrestling info will need other books but should consider reading this one to make sure all their hardwork doesn't result in a turd of a final presentation/project deliverable.

Nutshell review - A decent book on dashboard design. I had hoped for more examples of good design rather than more examples of bad. Worth looking at nonetheless.

This book offers more than the title might suggest...more specifically, this title provides a good foundation for how to communicate data visually in general. Stephen Few does a good job demonstrating examples of good and "not so good" visual presentations of data utilizing Information Dashboards.

I found the example Information Dashboards at the end of the book to be particularly useful. This book could serve as a good reference for those interested in effectively communicating data visually.

this book is worth every penny. i use it all the time as a reference and it's a good read.

Mr. Few's book boils down to one message - the point of a dashboard is to convey the right information simply, without confusion or distraction. He then proceeds to show by copious examples the various techniques to use AND to avoid to accomplish this goal.

His points about how to visually focus on the data rather than the "fluff" in charts and overall design are excellent. Especially valuable are discussions of how placement, grouping and other non-data display design elements affect our interpretation of the data.

The author, however, does have a fairly large blind spot (if you will forgive the pun) regarding the use of color when the target audience includes people with visual disabilities such as color blindness (like myself). He has an entire chapter on Visual Perception, but fails to address this crucial issue when discussing "limits to visual perception". And at one point when specifically discussing designing his own bullet graphs for colorblind people, the author states "any hue will do" and then shows an example using a hue where I can NOT perceive the different gradients.

In summary, this is an excellent starter book on good dashboard design. However, if you have users with visual disabilities like mine, be sure to verify your design with your special case users.

I found this book to be a must have for anyone working with dashboards, BI tools and data visualization. Take a look around the web (or where you work) and you will see people violating Few's most common mistakes repeatedly. Features of these tools are being abused for a "gee whiz" impact that may impress some in a presentation or board room, but fail to deliver the most elegant and useful solution. Alas, we seem not to learn these most basic lessons with every new medium from the GUI to the web to dashboards. When it comes to dashboards, Few is "driving" in the right direction and when the initial excitement cools, I'm sure his approach and advice will be broadly recognized.

First, I think this book has something to offer to everyone. But if you have already read at least two of Edward Tufte's books on visualizing information, then you are probably better off borrowing and browsing through this book for 20 or 30 minutes rather than purchasing it. The book is mostly derivative of the kind of work Tufte does, so it won't offer a lot of new ideas for readers well-read in the area. The first chapter contains an overview of the history/main issues in dashboard design. The final chapter includes helpful good and bad examples that demonstrate the main ideas introduced in this book. I think anyone can take something away from these sections of the book.

For the rest of you... do you think pie charts are pretty? Do you like those default 3D bar charts in MS Excel? For the sake of everyone you work with, please pick up this book. It's a good overview of issues in this area and you will be better at communicating information if you pay attention to the ideas and study all the examples of this book.

If you were to listen to Dashboard software vendors then you'd think that information dashboards are built with speed dial, 3D pie-charts and bar-charts and nice background images. Of course what do these vendors know.

In this book you will find examples for many industries of what a good information dashboard could be like. It really is a learn by example. But as you go through the book, you notice that the same graphics artifacts are used again and again.

The author shows you to use the best artifacts for a given objective: sparklines, bar-charts, dot-plots and tables. You will also learn to make good use of your chart axis and borders so that they too can provide valuable information.

I've not read dozens of books on the topic but this one is certainly one of the very good one. He is also part of the Edward Tufte school of thought, to which I also adhere.

I stumbled across this while browsing around a Chapters bookstore in Vancouver and I'm glad I did. It's inexpensive, short and to the point, full of colourful examples and well worth my time.

I couldn't say whether or not this information is better seen elsewhere (I haven't yet read Tufte) I will say that I did learn much from its presentation here and highly recommend it to anyone working on a dashboard. One could level the same criticisms against Don't Make Me Think, but its brief and quirky presentation elevates it over its sources' typically verbose and dry styles. Perhaps that's the same with Few, I couldn't say.

If you're anywhere near a dashboard, I suggest giving this a quick read.

All of us are living with more data in our lives. Every day the amount of data is growing. Not surprisingly, there is also a growing number of software companies attempting to "help" us navigate all of this data. Dashboards are a recent advancement in database and business intelligence software that attempts to consolidate all of the reports, charts, graphs that we use all day onto a single screen. Unfortunately, most software vendors have missed the mark. They have not done a great job with the visual design of dashboards.

Stephen Few provides a great overview of dashboard design in this book. Chapter three is particularly good. In it, he lists thirteen common mistakes of dashboard design. Business intelligence software vendors and consultants should definitely read this. Like Edward Tufte before him, Few promotes elegant simplicity as a design goal for visual interfaces. He goes deeper than Tufte, however, and provides many more specific examples.

This book provides a very good framework for how to graphically design performance dashboards.
It focuses entirely on the graphical design and does not take into account aspects of selecting the right KPIs, how to gather data, and how to make dashboards interactive and supporting root cause analysis.

This is truly a great resource for Analysts who are working with Data Visualization Models. I also recommend a tool called Xcelsius from Business Objects for Data Visualization.

Its a fun and easy software that transforms your everyday Excel spreadsheets into persuasive presentations and dynamic business dashboards, and then share them easily via Microsoft PowerPoint, Word, or the Web. Download CX Now In 5 minutes you will transform a dull spreadsheet into an interactive and persuasive PowerPoint presentation. Move a slider, and watch your column chart change. Push a button, and see your projected sales for the next three years. It's that easy. Don't bore another audience with the same old static presentations.

Visit: www.xcelsius.wordpress.com for more.

This book is great, it gets to the point, tells you what you need to know, provides many examples and is entertaining at the same time. The people who are still fascinated by all the colors in their kids Crayola boxes probably would object to some of Few's points.

The key elements of dashboard design (avoid clutter, focus and limit visual cues, beware of rainbow colors, carefully chose when to show numbers, tables or (appropriate) graphs), converted in a very lengthy and expensive piece of litterature. And the results is by all accounts debatable in terms of look and feel, in particular as very little attention is given to who your audience is...
I would not recommend this book.

There can be no doubt that the pages of this book contain some of the most original and decisive ideas about dashboard design of any book to come out on the market. Yet this strength cannot quite redeem it. This book is mostly pictures, figures, and graphs, many of which are not needed. The same could be said of dashboards in general. The prose is watered down and childlike, as if the author would spoon feed his ideas, one per chapter, to an infant audience. In the end I am forced to conclude that, like many tech books in HCI, a hard core text filled with complex ideas, lean, well-written chapters, and something like wit is both outside the reach of its authors and outside the bounds of contemporary techie marketing. This book may sell, but it does nothing to promote a sophisticated, confident HCI core at a time when awareness of the profession is still patchy. It will be a great day for HCI when its "Gurus" stop condescending to their audience.

This is an easy to read book which does a fantastic job of conveying the topic material. I strongly agree with Few's perspective and think that you wouldn't go wrong with a design that's in alignment with this book.

This manual is a great resource for best practices and principles for designing dashboards. It doesn't matter if you buy or build, the material is golden.

Found this book great for discussing how to better structure dashboard interfaces yet as other reviews highlight the real meat is only a fraction of the book.

I think this book suits programmers, dreamweaver artists and web project managers more than it does information designers as many of the insights are intuitive to them.

What I struggled with the most was the amount of slagging of existing systems that the author does. For all the negativity he then only has one or two examples of how it should work. Thus real take home value is the final chapter.

I am actually in the process of creating a marketing dashboard for a Fortune 500 company. I am essentially the lead for this project and wanted to get up to speed in a hurry on the current thinking about dashboards and the visual display of data---this book has been very helpful.

Actually, I have really learned a great deal about what NOT to do when it comes to creating a dashboard.

Colors? No.

Pie Charts? Don't even think of 'em.

How about cool little gauges that look like the speedometer in your car? Please.

Author Stephen Few basically shoots down just about everything you ever thought you knew about what would constitute a good dashboard. What he emphasizes, time and again, is simplicity.

Taking his own advice, the book iteself is very simple and can be read in a few hours as most of its pages contain pictures of, well, examples of bad dashboard design.

My only criticism of the book is that there simply aren't enough examples of good dashboard design.

If you are working on a project that involves the visual display of data, then you should definitely read this book.

It's a good book with good insight on what a dashboard is and isn't, which can help guide design heuristics and guidelines. Might be good to supplement it with an Edward Tufte book for more perspective on general information visualization.

I've been poking through this book for the last several months as I've been starting to get my head around KPI and dashboard capabilities in SharePoint Server 2007. The book's a great bit on figuring out the best ways to concisely display critical summary information on a single screen for an at-a-glance overview.

The book's broken out into solid chapters covering dashboard history/background, uses, design mistakes, and the value of simplicity in dashboard content. The style of the book is clear, and it's concise and well-written. There's also great use of color which is terrific because so much of dashboards is about helping give quick visual impacts via smart use of colors.

The intro chapter gives a lot of examples of dashboards, but I found it disappointing in that it doesn't really lay out clear opinions on whether the author liked or disliked the boards. That weakness is limited to the first chapter, though, because the rest of the book does a great job of laying out problematic dashboards and talking about the fundamental issues behind those problems. Few hits a lot of common things like making dashboards which require scrolling to hit all the parts of a dashboard, or fragmenting dashboard content into multiple screens accessed through tabs.

Few's writing style is very clear, and he's got great insight into many details about what makes a good dashboard -- small details like prefering bar charts over pie charts in all but a few cases, or ensuring that you're setting the proper context for visual information.

I'm definitely not a great visual design guy, so this book's been a great help to me in thinking about how to best represent critical data. Frankly, I think the book's a great aid in helping figure out not just dashboards, but how to best represent any critical information in a clear fashion.

(I've amended this review a bit in response to author Stephen Few's comment below. Few is correct: I shouldn't categorically state that ALL of the advice in the book can be found in Tufte. Much of it can, though Few adds good information about things like which graph type works with different types of data.)

I picked this up for free at a conference, so I haven't given this as close a read as if I'd shelled out my own cash for it. It seems to be a perfectly useful book on a very specific topic. However nearly all of the advice about creating usable and valuable information displays comes right out of Edward Tufte's books. All of Few's lessons, tips, and design pointers are basically the same advice you can get from Tufte's far more beautiful books. That's not necessarily bad, Few's book is less than half the price of any of Tufte's hardcover-only, private-press publications.

It's also too bad that Few couldn't find any examples of well-designed information dashboards. It's shocking, really: there is not a single screenshot in this book that isn't used as an example of what NOT to do. And some of them are so dreadful it boggles the mind, with horrible colors, strange gimmicky graphics, an endless use of the red-yellow-green traffic light metaphor and on and on. Apparently no designer has ever worked on any of these products.

I picked this up for free at a conference, so I haven't given this as close a read as if I'd shelled out my own cash for it. It seems to be a perfectly useful book on a very specific topic. However all (and I mean ALL) of the advice about creating usable and valuable information displays comes right out of Edward Tufte's books. All of Few's lessons, tips, and design pointers are basically the same advice you can get from Tufte's far more beautiful books. That's not necessarily bad, Few's book is less than half the price of any of Tufte's hardcover-only, private-press publications.

It's also too bad that Few couldn't find any examples of well-designed information dashboards. It's shocking, really: there is not a single screenshot in this book that isn't used as an example of what NOT to do. And some of them are so dreadful it boggles the mind, with horrible colors, strange gimmicky graphics, an endless use of the red-yellow-green traffic light metaphor and on and on. Apparently no designer has ever worked on any of these products.

I picked this up for free at a conference, so I haven't given this as close a read as if I'd shelled out my own cash for it. It seems to be a perfectly useful book on a very specific topic. However all (and I mean ALL) of the advice about creating usable and valuable information displays comes right out of Edward Tufte's books. All of Few's lessons, tips, and design pointers are basically the same advice you can get from Tufte's far more beautiful books. That's not necessarily bad, Few's book is less than half the price of any of Tufte's hardcover-only, private-press publications.

It's also too bad that Few couldn't find any examples of well-designed information dashboards. It's shocking, really: there is not a single screenshot in this book that isn't used as an example of what NOT to do. And some of them are so dreadful it boggles the mind, with horrible colors, strange gimmicky graphics, an endless use of the red-yellow-green traffic light metaphor and on and on. Apparently no designer has ever worked on any of these products.

At last .. a documenting tech-head with a sense of humour. I found this book enlightening, amusing (ok tongue-in-cheek style) and useful. What more could you want in a manual? The book is a little more glossy than it needs to be, and if they cut down on the white-space it would fit into my handbag. However, the content is excellent. It's easy to read, easy to follow, and gives you everything you need to know about developing the most effective and efficient dashboards. I recommend this to everyone who has to design and/or develop performance solutions for their business community.

At last .. a documenting tech-head with a sense of humour. I found this book enlightening, amusing (ok tongue-in-cheek style) and useful. What more could you want in a manual? The book is a little more glossy than it needs to be, and if they cut down on the white-space it would fit into my handbag. However, the content is excellent. It's easy to read, easy to follow, and gives you everything you need to know about developing the most effective and efficient dashboards. I recommend this to everyone who has to design and/or develop performance solutions for their business community.

A sequel to the previous version of the book (show me the numbers), this book is similarly content free. Invest your time and money on a book that goes beyond what you already know or can guess from common sense!

I'm trying to improve my skills in the concise presentation of data. This book was easy to read and has very helpful visual examples with lots of good criticism and guidelines. I recommend this book.

Here's how it could be improved. First, it's too long. He says some things several times, when he usually said it best the first time. (To be fair, he probably spent a huge amount of time on layout and graphics, and probably had to produce 200 pages.) It's a good book at 200 pages. If they used normal margins and said only what was necessary, it could be a Great book at 75 pages. Not a big deal. It's easy reading.

Also, this is not anything like a developer's guide. There is ZERO mention of any software--purely about how the graphs/data should look. This book is about clear presentation (which starts with thoughtful and simple design), not about how to build anything.

A main principle in his advice is to get rid of all the excess ink; forget the art, this is about communicating information. To a large extent, and as a basis, he's right. But towards the end of the book, he dings some attractive designs for using photo-realistic shading and other little dress-ups that actually look really good in some cases. He goes a little too far toward visually-bland at times, but in many cases he's right--many times the things we add to try to dress up a view actually detract from the information, flow, and grokking of the communice.

Once again, I recommend this book. Just keep in mind that mankind has been evolving the elements of style in written communication for a few thousand years. This book will help.

The first half of the book is a large sampling of dashboards from various applications, and it can be both over whelming as well as what seems a little dated.

If you were expecting GUI eye candy, this is not the book for you.

The second half of the book enumerates a large list of attributes found in good dashboard designs, describing in impact of things like color, boldness, size and so forth. It then goes into a very well written treaty concerning each of these attributes, what they convey, what they don't, and how they interact with other attributes.

If you're looking to display a lot of information in a condensed area in a way that's summarizing and still quite meaningful, this is the book for you. It is a fantastic resource for visualizing data.

If the book covered more detail, used examples with mouth watering GUIs, ad put the examples last, it would have scored five stars.

I don't use or create dashboards, but I've been looking for clear guidance in the area of graphs and charts. The Wall Street Journal and the Economist seems to have mastered the job of cranking them out. Instead of aping the ones in the paper, I needed some background training to appreciate what I'm seeing. I tried Tufte's beautiful work, but found it too abstract for a first-timer.

Stephen Few is evidently a man of taste and wisdom. This volume speaks eloquently and in the just the right amount about common pitfalls and the path that avoids them. He performs a tremendous and valuable service assimilating work by other greats in this field and adding useful innovations of his own.

If you appreciate great design, and work with numbers, especially Excel, this will make you a hero. Rarely do you acquire expensive new skills as easily as you will by reading this book.

I consider that this book is really useful for a person like me.. who have the principles about Dashboards but don't hnow how present the numbers in the best way...

Excellent resource to provide guidance on information dashboard design. Not a step-by-step book, nor a recipe book. I found it very useful in initiating discussions on the subject with management. Would highly recommend!

A should read for all dashboard designers as well as software engineers, who are programming all those new flashy features into their dashboard tools.

Forget all the speedometers, pie charts, and 3-d charts and focus on conveying the message in a clear & concise format instead.
Focus on the message and not colorful, but distracting dashboards.

This book covers a lot of design fundamentals with a lot of examples. It does not cover how to select the KPIs to be displayed, but how to display KPIs, once they are chosen.

This book primarily deals with what the title says. Dashboards. I was not aware ofthe complexity and breadth of this type of interface, but since it is not a forte I usually provide to clients, the book was an interesting read.

Way back when I got into digital work, I first learnt as a programmer and put together simple applications. Even then, it was really the program that allowed the interface to be built and dictated what and how things were displayed. Today, one can customize an interface for dashboard software, be it tied through a network, RIA, or some other data stream. There are simple rules to follow and key learnings that this book can translate to other design realms.

Had a client choose your worst mock? Been there - done that. This books best advice is simple. Choose the best design that fits the needs of your clients and present that. The rest of the advice and as to why, you should find out for yourself.

Well worth the money. Suitable for all designers to get a different perspective on interfaces and a couch jumper for those who are managing reporting systems for clients (inhouse or not).


Appeal to software architects, interface designers and other designers such as web, RIA, DVD or interested parties. Not relevant to the print crowd too much.

I had high hopes when picking up this book. In the end I found little of use. Perhaps I was looking for more than an approach that was business oriented. Information displays for systems monitoring are a topic almost completely missed in the book.

What is a dashboard?

No, I don't mean the dashboard of an automobile, but rather the dashboard as it relates to computers and people that use them. Quite simply, a dashboard is like an overview. It's a screen or a web page that displays relevant important content all in one handy place. Instead of having to click from one content area to the other, a user can quickly glance at a dashboard and gather all sorts of useful info without having to perform a lot of navigation. If you are a user of Quicken or Microsoft Money you will be very familiar with dashboards. These applications have used this technique for a long time, providing important financial information such as bills that are due or where money is going... information that you would like to be front and center, not having to click all over the place to get a quick snapshot of the data you want to see.

What Stephen Few does in this book is provide the reader with a fantastic way to look at dashboards. Learn how to avoid mistakes such as making the user have to scroll when that is exactly NOT what you want them to do, providing information that isn't relevant, and/or using meters when graphs or charts would be more applicable. With a nice size to the book, vibrant colors, and great examples, this is a book that provides wonderful suggestions on how to improve design so that developers can create dashboards which are slick, smooth, and most of all... EFFICIENT.

If you are designing or developing a dashboard to serve as an informational tool for your users or is the central focus point of what you are working on, you would be very wise to pick up 'Information Dashboard Design' to get the job done and done right.

**** RECOMMENDED

One of the system architecture ideas that has waxed and waned over the years is the concept of an Information Dashboard... a single screen of data that summarizes key data points for quick monitoring by executives. But just throwing a few graphs on the web page isn't necessarily the right thing to do. Stephen Few covers the subject of dashboard design in his book Information Dashboard Design : The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

Contents: Clarifying the Vision; Variations in Dashboard Uses and Data; Thirteen Common Mistakes in Dashboard Design; Tapping Into the Power of Visual Perception; Eloquence Through Simplicity; Effective Dashboard Display Media; Designing Dashboards for Usability; Putting it All Together; Appendix; Index

For someone like me (not a whiz when it comes to graphic design) to really like a book of this nature is saying something. I actually understood everything he was writing, and I didn't think this was some self-serving "listen to me because I'm an expert" volume. The book is printed on heavy paper stock and full color, so the examples don't lose any impact in the normal translation to black and white. Lavishly illustrated with examples both good and bad, it's easy to see why some things work and some don't. Even designs that I thought "looked" professional had significant drawbacks. For instance, colors should represent the same thing throughout the page. Don't make a pie chart with a red slice if you want red to represent a danger indicator somewhere else on the screen. Minimize the non-data pixels so the eyes don't have to work at interpreting data from "fluff" (like graph lines). And when you're choosing graphing formats, make sure you choose ones which are relevant to the data being displayed. Don't choose a pie chart when a bar graph makes an easier comparison. He even goes into color choices and how they cause the mind and eye to group things on the page. Normally I'd be reading material like this with a "says you!" attitude, but there wasn't a single instance where I thought he was pushing his own preferences instead of something that actually made sense and had some research behind it. I actually found myself thinking about some of my own application designs based on the material presented, as well as how I need to change a few things along the way.

If you're not a graphically oriented person (like I'm not), this book is a lifesaver for your design and development efforts. It should remain close at hand as you do your web site design on a daily basis. And even if you *do* know what you're doing, you will likely become a whole lot better at it after reading Information Dashboard Design.

One of my project managers lent this to me at work when we talked about dashboard development. I am a .net developer with a background in SQL Server.

The author has some great points about the unnecessary fluff in dashboard graphing. For instance, focusing attention on 3d aspects as well as shading brings no value to the graph. But who doesn't already know this? He states things that are important or matter should come first on a dashboard and should be noticeable, again who doesn't know this?

His examples were well drawn? Or where they developed in a language such as Dundas graphs with .net technologies? We won't know because there is absolutely no source code. So if you are looking for a book that has examples with code, you wont find it here. What you will find here is good practices and how to keep your dashboard clean.

I would of given the book a 3.5 stars but you cant, so I was being a bit nice. The author is knowledgeable but most of it is knowledge that most designers already know.

After reading this book I have the following positive points to make:

.. It is very well designed, it is nice to look at it.

.. Has some good ideas (but they are not original ones).

.. In general, following its advice you will be able to do a better design of dashboards and management information systems screens.

If I counted only this I would give it 5 stars, but, I think this book has some negative points. One of the points makes the author inconsistent with his own recommendations throughout the book.

The book is about designing dashboards and the major line of thought is:
- keep it simple, clean and objective.
- Use the tools (graphics and tables) in a rational way.
- don't use all the fancy features that software vendors put in their products for they will make your dashboard less effective.

But the author when writing it, forgot part of his own teachings and produced a text that is very prolixic, too many words to explain simple concepts and ideas. Lacks objectivity.

So, if you want to better understand the use of graphs, take a look at Naomi Robbins, "Creating More Effective Graphs". This book is very objective, simple and fast to read.

The second flaw is that in the examples to show how to do a well designed dashboard, the author used two types of graphs that are not available in today's softwares. One type of graph was created by the author while writing this book (bullet graphs) and the other (sparkline) is the creation of Mr.Tufte, which will appear in a future book of his. It would be more useful to see examples with the typical tools available to design a dashboard.


So, be prepared for a nice experience with pictures and graphs in a sea of words. It still is a good book that will help design dashboards and the like.

After reading this book I have the following positive points to make:

.. It is very well designed, it is nice to look at it.

.. Has some good ideas (but they are not original ones).

.. In general, following its advice you will be able to do a better design of dashboards and management information systems screens.

The negative points on this book:

.. It is very prolixic, too many words to explain simple concepts and ideas. Lacks objectivity. To better understand the use of graphs, I recommend Naomi Robbins, "Creating More Effective Graphs", a book that is very objective, simple and fast to read.

.. The other flaw is that in the examples to show how to do a well designed dashboard, the author used two types of graphs that are not available in today's softwares. One type of graph was created by the author while writing this book (bullet graphs) and the other (sparkline) is the creation of Mr.Tufte, which will appear in a future book of his. It would be more useful to see examples with the typical tools available to design a dashboard.


My summary is: be prepared for a nice experience with pictures and graphs in a sea of words. It is a good book that will help you in designing dashboards and the like.

After reading this book I have the following points to make:

It is very well designed, it is nice to look at it.

Has some good ideas, but not original ones.

It is very prolixic, too many words to explain simple concepts and ideas. Lacks objectivity.

In general it helps design dashboards and management information systems screens.

One flaw is that in the examples to show how to do a well designed dashboard, the author used two types of graphs that will be difficult to find a software that supports them, because one was invented by the author while writing this book (bullet graphs) and the other (sparkline) is the creation of Mr.Tufte, which will appear in a future book of his.

In summary be prepared for a nice experience with pictures and graphs in a sea of words. It is a good book that will help you in designing dashboards and the like.

This book is a very good help if you want to design an Information System that will be usable everyday.

It helps showing what doesn't work with very good examples taken from vendors (that display dashboards to impress the user on their web sites).

It provides rules to help you design your own system, in a very clear way. The examples are well thought and demonstrate the concepts and rules.

But.... contrary to its own teachings... it uses more words than required to explain some ideas and concepts, making the book a little too verbose. For example on page 130 you find (first paragraph):
" I can state with some confidence that bullet graphs work well, because I've tested them in controlled experiments to compare them to simple radial gauges. In my tests, bullet graphs outperformed radial gauges both in efficiency and accuracy of perception. The number of test subjects was far too small to satisfy scientific standards, so I'll refrain from claiming specific measures of superior performance. These tests were sufficient, however, to enable me to state without reservation that bullet graphs work every bit as well on dashboards as radial gauges and are able to convey the same information in much less space. I believe that makes them superior. "
Instead of these many words, the author could write: I invented the bullet graph and I think they are awesome!

Despite these flaws the book will be of help for anyone designing management information systems and dashboards.

I suppose that comparisons to Tufte's work are unavoidable, for he is the best known expert in visual information display and his work is undeniably elegant, but "Information Dashboard Display" is an entirely different type of book. While Tufte and Few would probably agree on most points in a discussion of information visualization, Tufte's focus is wide-ranging and conceptual, while Few focuses on the practical needs of business, and in this book specifically on dashboard design.

Few pulls together relevant advice from a vast body of research, organizes it, and makes it digestible for people like me who must display large amounts of data in the limited space of a single computer screen in a way that clearly and efficiently communicates. No one else has done this. He exposes the common problems in visual dashboard design and step by step leads the reader through practical instruction in how to do it right. I have a job to do; this book has helped me do it, and do it well.

99.9% of the content is derived from Tufte, but Tufte covers more. I feel that the content was "padded" and it takes a long time to get to the beef, but its there. $ for $ Tufte is the better buy, but the Examples of Good and Bad dashboard implementation are clear and usefull, and the book is well produced and has a great feel to it. But note this is about graphical design not dashboard Content design. I agree with author when he states that it's a little presumptious of him to claim to have invented bullet graphs, but he is the first to get them into print and he presents a definition of their construction which is useful. The most important thing I learnt is that there is an upcoming as yet unpublished edition from Tufte due in 2006 from which he references. I await that eagerly.

I am currently working (as a software developer) on building a platform which incorporates a dashboard, so this book caught my attention. I learned a lot more than I ever really wanted to know about dashboard design aesthetics, visual perception and color theory; but if you're looking for a one-stop-shop detailing dashboard design, this is the book.

From the perspective of a software developer, I found the chapter "Thirteen Common Mistakes in Dashboard Design" quite useful. It discusses (obviously) thirteen "no-nos" when designing a dashboard. It has plenty of pictures illustrating the mistakes and describing helpful alternatives. The book is quick to read, the examples and critiques are explained well and easy to follow.

Not having a design background, I don't feel qualified to comment on the content other than to say it all made sense to me. :) I did, however, loan the book to one of our in-house design guys - he said it was "pretty good" and would recommend it.

If you're directly involved in building or designing a dashboard, this book is nice because it's all about dashboards - rather than a design book with just a chapter or two on dashboards.

This is one of the most insightful books on data visualization I have read so far. The author is rather critical of existing dashboard products, which he sees as favoring "decorative flourishes" over simplicity and usefulness. Screenshots are used to illustrate his points and to show alternative solutions. This book can be recommended to anyone who is interested in the display of information and usability issues.