Best Practices for Building Your Own CRM Analytics Dashboard

Follow best practices to design and build useful, effective CRM Analytics dashboards, while minimizing rework and addressing potential gaps.

Design a dashboard as a focused, task-oriented app. Work from purpose to structure to surface. Decide who it's for and what they need to do, map how they move through the data, and choose the look and feel last.

• Before you build the dashboard, take into account the following design best practices:
  • Sketch your dashboard on paper or a whiteboard before you start building.
  • Know your audience. Identify who uses the dashboard and what decisions they make with it, and then design for that path of inquiry. See Design for Your Audience: Personas and the Path of Inquiry.
  • Prioritize elements, top left to bottom right. With languages that are read left to right, people start by looking at the top left corner and work their way down. Consider the audience's language and design for it. If your audience has limited time or attention, place important elements where they are noticed.
  • Place high-level, easy-to-read, actionable widgets near the top left, and place widgets with supporting information lower. For example, place numbers that display a single measure, such as revenue for the current quarter, high and to the left. Highlight facts that the audience wants to know at a glance.
    
  • Group filters together at the top or left so that they're quickly noticeable. Use a container widget to section them off in the dashboard.
  • A chart in CRM Analytics is primarily a way to ask questions, not a way to illustrate a conclusion. A good dashboard invites the audience to drill down and seek ever more focused and useful information.
  • Choose chart types based on the characteristics of the data, not for appearance or variety. For example, if most of your charts display value changes over time, they can all be line charts. See Choose the Right Chart for Your Data.
  • If a chart seems to need a lengthy caption or title, reconsider whether the chart is doing its job. Well-chosen data often speaks for itself.
  • Use container widgets to frame and organize related elements in the dashboard.
    
• While you build the dashboard:
  • Apply labels to sections and charts to annotate the dashboard.
    
  • Use colors to define sections.
    
  • Don't clutter the dashboard. Leave some empty space. If needed, break a dashboard into a series of dashboards. Use link widgets to help the user navigate them. To show more detail without adding clutter, use progressive disclosure. See Reduce Clutter with Progressive Disclosure.
  • Design for accessibility. Turn on high-contrast colors and follow color and contrast guidance so that everyone can use your dashboard. See Design Accessible CRM Analytics Dashboards.
    
  • Make insights actionable. Let users act on what they see, update a record, start a flow, or open a related record, without leaving the dashboard. See Make CRM Analytics Dashboards Actionable.
  • Build for performance as you go. Keep queries and widget counts lean so that dashboards load fast. See Best Practices for CRM Analytics Dashboard Performance.
• After you build the dashboard:
  • Have users review the dashboard before making it final. Post a dashboard to Chatter to get feedback. Users can annotate the widgets in the dashboard to have conversations about the content.
  • Review the dashboard against a final checklist: every widget maps to a question and an action, key metrics are top-left, chart types match the data, color is used consistently and works in high contrast, the default page loads quickly, and the dashboard renders well wherever it's used.