Here at Plecto, we know that designing an engaging dashboard that covers all bases can be tricky. You want your dashboard to be intuitive and comprehensive but also easy to understand and attractive all at the same time! Luckily, we have put everything for you in one article, so you can easily find Plecto’s dashboard design principles in one place!
One of the main reasons our customers use Plecto is because they want an effective way to display KPIs and metrics to their employees in real-time. But how do you go about designing an engaging dashboard that actually gets your employees excited and passionate about achieving their performance metrics?
This is where we can help. In this article, we will answer how to design a dashboard and provide you with ideas that encourage employee engagement. Keep reading to find out what they are!
6 Dashboard design principles which to engage your employees
1. Display KPIs that employees can influence
It is important that when designing your dashboard, you pick KPIs and metrics that employees can impact. Seeing real-time data will empower fellow teammates to make faster decisions and critically evaluate problems in the current situation. This is important as if employees are constantly exposed to KPIs that they have no control over, they will have no motivation to change them.
If you are not sure about best practices for dashboard design and don’t know which KPIs to choose, here is some inspiration. A couple of examples of good performance metrics in sales are win rate, number of meetings, and closed deals. Bad marketing metrics are ones like sessions and bounce rate - KPIs the employee can’t influence and shouldn’t be measured by.
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2. Personalize and customize dashboards
To increase employees’ connection to their work, you can use their names and pictures to be displayed alongside their results. Personalization will not only empower the top performers, but can be used as inspiration for other team members, who still need to reach their targets.s. No doubts, seeing results you will be able to motivate your team and reach goals faster than expected!
This creates a sense of attachment and responsibility and will make employees more engaged and motivated to meet and exceed their KPIs.
Still have questions about how to design a dashboard? The answer is simple: make your dream dashboard according to all your needs!
Plecto dashboards are fully customizable so the possibilities are endless when it comes to design. Your employees could even design some dashboards of their own if there's specific KPIs or performance metrics they'd like to keep track of!
3. Recognize achievement
By using Plecto’s notification features, you can easily recognize and acknowledge when an individual or the team achieves a goal or hits a milestone.
You can play a custom sound, display an image or a video when a trigger is activated. This could be a closed deal, a new sign-up or a great customer support rating. It’s a great way to let everyone know you achieved one or another goal!
Recognizing achievement in this open way encourages employees to repeat the behavior. This will increase a company's overall performance since all team members will try to reach better results. To add an extra level of motivation, you can give employees a prize to coincide with their successes shown on the dashboard. Choose the most effective method of rewarding your employees, whether that's badges, material gifts, a free lunch, or anything else. Below are some additional suggestions for spicing up the rewards process.
4. Use gamification features
In a couple of our blog posts, we discuss what gamification is and how it can be used in business.
To quickly refresh your memory, gamification is the process of applying game-like features such as the element of competition and points, to non-gamified situations or tasks to make people want to partake in them or enjoy them more.
Plecto's gamification elements include points, badges, and leaderboards to encourage a competitive spirit amongst team members. Employees can earn any kind of badge, such as "most concluded deals," "fastest mover," "employee of the month," and so on. Feel free to get creative with the addition of badges to the names of your team members in order to motivate them to work harder!
The psychological drives behind gamification are powerful:; so there is no doubt your team will become more engaged. This is especially true in sales departments where everyone wants to be number one!
5. Make your dashboard intuitive
Our full ‘golden rules’ of dashboard design can be found in our dedicated blog post but we’ll quickly summarize what we discussed for you now.
We mentioned using large text as it helps with readability, using different widgets to keep the dashboard visually appealing and also using conditional colors as this allows dashboards to be understood at a glance.
All 3 dashboard design principles are the “main secret” to a well-looking dashboard, which can be useful and attractive at the same time.Having an intuitive dashboard means that employees are going to look at it a lot more, and are going to be able to understand what the dashboard is telling them. Some good advice would be, to keep information simple and easy to read. This results in them being more engaged in their KPIs.
6. Display dashboards on a TV
Plecto dashboards can be displayed on any TV with an internet connection – and it’s super easy. Getting set up is straightforward and simple. By displaying on TVs, you can show slideshows of your dashboards to your entire workplace, so that everyone can stay updated on each other's progress and celebrate successes together. Likewise, it’s also a great way to identify which KPIs need to be improved for your team since all the data can be seen real-time.
Displaying a dashboard on a TV screen across the office increases your employees’ accountability for their performance and motivates them to achieve as their results are visible for all to see. It's important to note that you can showcase multiple dashboards in a single presentation by customizing the duration of each slide and the dashboard that appears after it.
