Software Development Blog

Custom Dashboards: Why Are They so Helpful?

As our world becomes ubiquitously connected, companies are producing more data than ever before. And, deriving actionable insights from this data deluge is mission critical for ensuring solid business processes. To make the most of data, we should begin with the technical capability to analyze and visualize the data, thus, employ custom dashboard software.

I came, I saw, I conquered

Metrics are the numbers that serve as indicators of every process’ status and progress. Custom data visualization dashboards represent the most convenient way to have all the crucial metrics at the top of the fingertips.

A comprehensive dashboard is a data management tool that provides all key metrics in a digestible format. It enables real-time monitoring of the health of a specific process, department or the whole company. A dashboard organizes and consolidates various data from multiple sources into graphs, tables, charts, and gauges to immediately keep track of what is going on under the hood.

Cut a dash

Major benefits of custom dashboard apps:

  • Increased visibility with the help of dynamic and interactive reports
  • Alignment of company departments for more efficient collaboration
  • Integration of multiple systems and applications
  • Data-driven decisions
  • Ongoing performance measurements
  • Possibility to see data in the context and find patterns
  • Improved productivity and efficiency due to automation
  • Data transparency throughout the company

Horses for courses

Every company’s department establishes their own specific goals and needs peculiar types of data and metrics to keep their eye on. When designing a dashboard, we should target a particular type of users and show them the exact data they need to maximize their performance.

A marketing dashboard displays metrics across channels, like marketing analytics, KPIs, mailing lists, campaigns, social media, SEO, and lead generation, being the real-time window into the company’s marketing performance and helping inform marketing decision-making.

An operations dashboard provides a summary of each project’s operational status, including completion rates, pipeline, assets, events, and alerts. It is an excellent tool for the task and workflow management, which is vital to accomplishing the company’s objectives.

A sales dashboard provides an easy-to-read visual representation of sales-specific metrics intended to enable sales managers to optimize their approach to customer interactions and close more deals. These dashboards match the urgency of fast-paced teams.

Strategic dashboards are designed for C-level executives and provide to them a birds-eye view of the overall company KPIs to enable the rational business decisions. They include only and vital analytics for the company’s strategy.

Analytical dashboards are specially designed for data analysts. They offer filtering and data drill-down functionality and provide a possibility to have a granular look at the data in order to unearth specific trends and patterns.

Own shirt is closer to the body

How do you make your own dashboard? Yield to the temptation to use a ready-made solution or build your custom dashboard app? Traditional template-based solutions offer broad functionality and customization possibilities, but building a custom dashboard brings undeniable advantages:

  • Business-specific layouts. Custom dashboard software will enable you to see the only metrics, which are the most important for your specific business needs.
  • Hands-off reporting. A quick comparison, grouping, filtering, aggregation, and prioritization of different metrics in a single automated report.
  • Spotting trends and patterns.
  • Execution of sophisticated formulas for effective data sorting.
  • Granting access to share the custom dashboard with your team and clients through multiple channels to keep everyone on the same page.
  • A quick adjustment of the overall company strategy on the basis of real-time information.
  • Alerts with high-priority information when one of the key metrics is in danger.
  • Optimization, customization and adding extensions opportunities.

Phases of custom dashboard creation:

  • Discovery. We need to know where we are going to find out how to get there. At this stage, we conduct sessions with the end-users to identify their primary needs and ensure the dashboard answers their questions. As well, here the team chooses the right toolset and recommends data formats.
  • Analysis. Here we analyze the data, which has to be displayed in the dashboard, identify data sources, choose filters to be applied.
  • Ideation and wireframing. Here we create a document path to the goal with detailed components of the dashboard (charts, tables, etc.), and include action icons.
  • Design. We create clear and intuitive visualizations and keep the interface clean and consistent so that the dashboard provides insights at a glance. Also, we decide upon the placement of components, the color palette, and animations.
    Regarding the design, it would be useful to know how much does it cost to design a Web Application .
  • Data security. We do our best to ensure the sensitive data is properly secured and is unseen by the third parties.
  • Development. Once the design is approved, we build prototypes, code, perform tests, and launch.

With the help of effective custom dashboard software companies can boost their results, as well as achieve total visibility into the businesses, considerable time savings and accountability, increased team speed, improved risk identification, and reduced stress.

In order to use dashboard effectively, choose the right metrics and KPIs for display:

  • Total cost and overruns
  • Inventory size
  • Project progress
  • Productivity ratio
  • Team workload
  • Issue and risk tracking
  • Change management
  • Customer loyalty and retention
  • Sales growth and opportunities
  • Marketing ROI
  • Tasks tracking and statuses
  • Website analytics
  • Customer feedbacks
  • Employees goals and performance
  • Workflows

Dashboard Showcase

Here in LaSoft, we have extensive expertise in building dashboards that satisfy business needs. We would love to introduce you to a few of our dashboard solutions based on the latest trends in UI/UX design.

Deep Light

Deep Light is an intelligent system that provides insights for sales or marketing activities. The system is build using emerging technologies like Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, which helps to collect, analyze and summarize data of extensive external resources. Among the most recognized features of Deep Light are:

  1. 24/7 Crawling of media and social channels;
  2. Intelligent search and text summarization
  3. Sentiment analysis  
  4. Customizable dashboards  
  5. Event alerts etc.

The system is meant to be flexible and supportive for users. Their needs are entirely satisfied by providing them with visually appealing key data metrics. The dashboard allows a team to define a set of companies or industries to follow and obtain insights.

The Alerts Widget informs users about companies’ new and important events.

With the help of trending topics and companies, the team can review the relevant statistics and make you aware of topics/companies that are the most popular among journalists at any one time.

The dashboard displays a comparison of social and media activities for a range of selected companies, and users can choose a target period for review and examination of the statistics for today, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, or all the time.

Euronavigator

Euronavigator is a dashboard system that tracks the implementation process of legislative acts for Ukraine`s realization of commitment according to the Association Agreement. Euronavigator aims to inform citizens about the execution requirements and develop the ability to keep an eye on the progress towards realizing these requirements.

The project is composed of two applications: The Administrative Panel and Interactive Infographics.

The Administrative Panel is intended to fill and edit data about European acts, tasks which are accepted and accomplished by Ukraine to fulfill the requirements of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. An essential function of the Administrative panel is processing data that is gathered by Scrapper.

An interactive infographic is an online tool that represents the result of Ukraine’s implementation of the Association Agreement. The data updated in the Infographic is carried out after a change of legislation on both sides.

Kamsa

Kamsa is a tool for HR and management that helps to make compensation decisions based on the various data points provided – performance rating, market data, internal average salaries, date of hire, last pay change date, etc. Kamsa is the reason why managers have to get rid of old excel tables and start using advanced employee management tool.

Conclusion

Development of custom dashboard software may be invaluable in nurturing the culture of data transparency in your company. A properly constructed dashboard transforms raw data into sense. Custom dashboard software gives companies more control over their data, and, thus, over their critical decisions.

If you made up your mind to build your custom dashboard, then you should consider transferring this challenging task to professionals. We, at LaSoft, create custom highly productive dashboards specially adapted for different business needs. Check out our beautiful dashboards!

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