At Last! A Good Dashboard Design From Qliktech - or is it?

Posted by qvdesign on February 8, 2012 · 8 Comments 

It may be a bit of an exageration; there have been some reasonable looking dashboards that originated from the Qliktech mothership but so far I think this is the best one I’ve seen, it’s taken from a recent presentation delivered to Qliktech Partners via the Qollaborations scheme. However; there’s always a ‘however’, taking a closer look at this dashboard one can see that it’s actually more Photoshop than Qlikview; to be fair this was stated as being the case later in the presentation but it’s still more than a little quixotic to say ‘create dashboards like this…but you can’t actually do it in Qlikview’.

Good...For a Photshop Dashboard

There are a few things that I’m hoping are going to be transferred from this into v12 (and that give it away as not being created in Qlikview):

1: The font; it looks like either good ol’ Helvetica or Apples Myriad font to me. I don’t expect Qlikview to suddenly ship with inbuilt licencse only fonts like Helvetica but having a more reliable way of introducing new Fonts into a dashboard and making them reliably portable would be great. (This isn’t something I’ve experimented with too much but I have different fonts available at home compared to work but when I install a new font to Windows it doesn’t seem to pull through to QV?)

*I’ve just done some testing with adding new fonts and it seems it is indeed possible (although not 100% reliable) to import new fonts into QV in the same way you would MS Word…1x Helvetica font pack added to basket; check!

2. The borderless Pie Chart; I know pie charts are seen by many as the work of the devil but when they are of use it drives me made that they always have to have black borders and boundries – why?

3. The ‘Narrative Grid’; the info to the right of the pie is essentially a fancy table; we’ve got the dimension values used in the pie across the top and then 4 key metrics displayed for each field value like ‘Most Profitable’ and it’s all displayed with some good highlighting. I might try and re-create this in v10 and see where I can get but it would be great to have it straight out of the box.

UPDATE: Thanks to the comment below it seems that this prototype has actually been realised in Qlikview already:  http://eu.demo.qlikview.com/QvAJAXZfc/opendoc.htm?document=qvdocs/Asset%20Management.qvw&host=Demo11&anonymous=true not identical but impressively close, I hope this level of aesthetic permiates through the rest of the demo dashboards Qliktech releases…and stops those needless ‘but Tableau looks better’ statements!

I’ll see if I can get a copy of the total presentation to post as it is actually quite good and really demonstrates the power of good design…which after all is the point of this blog.

All the best,

Matt

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