Useful resources to help developers with dashboard creation

As organizations generate more data than ever, decisions driven by data insights are helping them evolve and expand. To access these insights, businesses rely on well-designed dashboards.

Dashboards are visual information tools that organizations use to access raw data in a representation format. Developers have to create dashboards in a manner to convey information efficiently. Usually, dashboards are designed to provide an understandable view of critical insights such as key performance indicators, revenues, sales, past performance, and more to predict future trends.

One of the nuances of dashboard creation is that it is easy to miss the difference between well-designed and ineffective dashboards. Fortunately, several resources can help with dashboard creation. At Talent500, we also rely on dashboards to use data insights to connect talent with the best companies; you can learn more about it here. In this article, we are sharing our engineers’ app dashboard design resources.

Best live examples of business dashboards with code for free 

Every developer struggles with inspiration when designing dashboards every once in a while. Fortunately, FusionCharts offers a massive library of beautifully created business dashboards that developers can use for free for creating web or mobile dashboards.

The live examples of different dashboards on the website are shared with the code. All the dashboards shared are built using the FusionCharts plugins. Irrespective of what technology you are using for your project, you can include FusionChart dashboards directly into the framework using these plugins. It supports all popular front-end design frameworks, including JavaScript, Vue, React, Angular, Ruby, Laravel, and Node.

On FusionCharts, you can also find dashboards for a particular category like SaaS, wealth management, shipping analysis, sales management, HR resolutions, and more. Once you find a dashboard that best matches your requirement, you can download its source file, make changes or introduce desired functionalities, and launch your dashboard quickly.

Flaticon

Dashboards that have visually exciting views appear appealing to users. Icons and elements used within an app dashboard design significantly affect its user experience. While creating icons and elements from scratch is an option, we strongly advise against it unless your dashboard requires extreme customizations. Flaticon is an excellent website for accessing over 8 million free vector icons and elements for free. 

It offers PSD, PNG, SVG, EPS, and CSS icons that you can directly include in your code. You can search for icons by terms or use. On Flaticon, you can edit icons before downloading. You can customize the icon color and size. In dashboard creation, icons can easily replace words to provide a summary view of everything without taking too much space. With the correct use of icons, you can display critical metrics without overcrowding the design.

Best practices for color blocking in data visualization 

A common problem with color on dashboards is that the designer sometimes uses too much of it, making the design overwhelming, or too little color, creating boring dashboards.

Colorblocking is the technique that helps balance the use of colors in dashboard creation. It is the practice of balancing monochromatic background colors against bright colors to highlight key insights and data anomalies. Here is an excellent guide on best practices for data visualizations using colors. The guide explores how developers can use data visualization to help viewers quickly digest information. It further explains how colors can be used to create associations, show continuation, comparison, and highlight fundamental data.

For more tips on front-end design concepts, refer to this guide.

Learn to design data tables

Data tables are the most used elements within a dashboard design to represent information to convey trends or change. Modern dashboard design dictates that dashboard data tables must be interactive and data must be correctly aligned.

A data table is a great way to represent information that has a large data set. For instance, to represent sales information for the past month table is excellent for displaying product, ID, number of sales, etc. The data table design guide by Taras Bakusevych is an excellent resource for learning how to make great use of space using data tables for dashboard creation. It also explains how data tables can scale the scope of dashboards.

Complete overview of best data visualization tools

As mentioned, dashboards often have to represent large data sets in an easy-to-understand format. Data representation is not always straightforward, and sometimes data is so large that it seems impossible to discern anything meaningful from them. This is what data visualization helps with. However, creating data visualizations from scratch is an epic waste of time, as you will have to spend hundreds of hours plotting points in a chart.

Fortunately, we have data visualization tools to help. These tools provide designers with an easier way to represent large data sets visually, making their jobs significantly simpler. There are dozens of data visualization tools available, but this Toptal article explores the best data visualization tools for dashboard creation.

We hope these dashboard creation resources will help you design better dashboards based on quality design principles.

At Talent500, we also rely on dashboards to use data insights to connect talent with the best companies; you can learn more about it here.