Learn · Dashboard design
How to design a Business Intelligence dashboard
A BI dashboard is a set of pages that help someone decide. Layout, colour and chart type matter, but they come after the questions, the KPIs and the model that can calculate them.
Give every page a job
One page to see status, one to compare, one to explain a gap, one to list what needs action. Mixing all of that on a single canvas is why so many reports feel busy and still fail to answer the question.
Start from the audience: an executive needs fewer, slower-moving KPIs; an operations user needs grain and filters. The same data model can feed both if the pages are designed on purpose.
Visuals last
Pick a visual because it matches the question (trend, contribution, distribution, list), not because it looks modern. KPI cards belong on metrics with a clear “up or down.” Charts need a category the model can slice.
How BiDesignLab uses this
After KPIs and the model are accepted, the studio proposes report pages and a layout, then packs them into a Power BI project plus Tableau and Qlik blueprints. You still approve the design before download.
Questions
- Should I copy a dashboard gallery?
- Galleries are useful for layout ideas. They are a poor substitute for your questions and your grain. A gym dashboard and a wholesale dashboard can share patterns and still need different KPIs.