In the design of enterprise software products, the dashboard is becoming an increasingly popular solution, often advertised as the cure all for corporate information overload and the big data deluge. Whether you're fitting together disparate pieces of a legacy software puzzle, deep diving into custom system analytics, or surfacing knowledge from a giant proprietary database, a custom dashboard might be the right choice for monitoring and mining your data.

However, dashboard design can be extremely tricky: With many possible user groups, from executives to project managers to administrators to domain specialists, no two dashboard solutions are the same, and one size never fits all.

At their best, enterprise dashboards convey key information at a glance to decision makers, saving companies time and money by creating process efficiencies and improving performance. At their worst, dashboards become glorified Google home pages stacked with widgets and UI cruft. So, how do we achieve the former and avoid the latter?

In this session, we'll discuss user interface design tenets for quality dashboard design—how to balance complexity, aesthetics, and information design; walk though examples of dashboard designs both good and bad; and examine case studies.

Dashboard design is an area of UX practice fraught with bad metaphors (computer software should not at all resemble an aircraft cockpit), and misguided best practices (like designing your dashboard for the newbie, rather than for the repeat user).

We’ll debunk the bad practices, celebrate the good ones, and take a comprehensive look at the place the dashboard now holds in enterprise software product design.