Many organizations today are taking steps to become data driven by utilizing models, analytics, data visualizations, and dashboards as an integral part of decision making. This is happening in many contexts such as business leaders improving customer experience; technology leaders analyzing agile, devops, and website metrics; and application teams embedding analytics in their applications.
That means many more developers, analysts, engineers, and managers are going to be involved in developing data visualizations and dashboards. With many organizations adopting self-service BI tools such as Tableau and Microsoft Power BI, it’s likely that at some point you’ll want to develop dashboards or you’ll get asked to as part of your priorities.
These tools are easy to learn, but avoid the temptation to design complex data visualizations that don’t get used. You need a design and development strategy and organizations need established data visualization standards.
There’s plenty of advice out there from strategic practices to design strategies to platform-specific standards for Tableau and Power BI. I’d like to share some practical standards that developers should consider.
