Executive dashboards have become popular in enterprise software applications. Consequently, much advice has been offered by private consulting firms on how best to design dashboards. This paper details a couple of studies testing the advice given by the dashboard experts. The results suggest that some of the notions about how dashboard widgets should be designed might be incorrect. The results indicate that colored widgets are not necessarily inferior to simpler, colorless widgets. Similarly, fancy widgets (i.e., those with three dimensional characteristics) were not demonstrated to be inferior to plainer widgets. While some methodological challenges must be overcome in similar future studies, the results of the described studies do not support some popular ideas about executive dashboards (and data visualization in general), and suggest that the area of interest is ripe for further investigation.
A Visual Tool for Rapid Integration of Enterprise Software Applications