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Dashboard Gauges: Indulgence with Restraint

Zach Gemignani

Tis the season of indulgence. Sometimes it is indulgence without any semblance of restraint. Case in point, the “Cherpumple” — a combination pumpkin, apple, and cherry pie framed in icing.

Cherpumple

When it comes to business dashboards, the gauge chart is often a case of indulgence without restraint. It can be equal parts waste of valuable pixels, low information, and visually deceptive. It would be a lot smarter to use a bullet chart — but who wants to pick the the fruit plate for desert?

Gauges have undeniable appeal to dashboard designers everywhere. Perhaps it is the “skeuomorphism” of a gauge chart. That is, it borrows from the look of something we are familiar with as a way to make us feel comfortable or understand its purpose.

Dundas Gauge

In the past, I’ve fought the good fight against these charts. Now I’m resigned to the fact that eradication is impossible. If that’s true, can we at least find some ways to make them better through design? Tone down the brilliant sheen and high-contrast colors; turn up the information conveyed.

First we can start by making them look better. Web designer Christian Annyas shared a beautiful gallery of Chevrolet speedometer designs across the years. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Chevrolet 1959 Apache Truck
Chevrolet 1960 Viking Truck

Christian even offers a decent argument for gauges over simply showing a value:

“It’s easy for a driver to get used to a needle that rises and passes numbers that are located on fixed positions. A quick glance is all it takes to see and understand the value it represents.”

Let’s take one of those designs, overlay a few necessary data elements, and see if we can create something worth looking at.

  1. Start with an classy Chevrolet design that lays out so as not to take up too much valuable vertical space
  2. Add subtle indicator of good and bad zones with green and red dots
  3. Show the current value with a bold label
  4. Display distribution of recent history to communicate how the value has changed

Better Gauge Chart

While this chart is still far from efficient in its data-to-ink ratio, at least it communicates the small amount of information effectively. Any ideas for how to make it better?

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  • http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/ Jon Peltier

    Eliminating gauges is a losing battle. In fact, eliminating bad charting practices is a losing battle. But I’m disappointed that you’ve bowed to the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude.

    The dial design you’ve selected has some shortcomings, despite the reduced retina burn from all the colors we usually see.

    You show the speed digitally, which makes the needle and scale somewhat redundant. I think if the early car designers had reliable digital displays, that’s what we would all have in our car dashboards, and about seven hundred blog posts like this one would never have been written.

    The dial you’ve chosen is a bit distorted: the needle’s orientation does not match the orientation of the text, and the hub of the needle is much closer to scale at the middle speeds than at the high and low extremes.

    Rather than a histogram of speeds, I’d think that a timeline might give a better picture. But then I’m an engineer once used to monitoring factory performance, and I’m thinking of a nice run chart.

    Red/green color schemes have come under attack of late because they are meaningless to those with color vision deficiencies (see for example http://vis4.net/blog/posts/goodbye-redgreen-scales/ and http://colororacle.cartography.ch/design.html). Keep the dots medium gray at the lower speeds, then change to intense red at the higher speeds, those likely to above speed limits.

    I’ve attached my proposed change to your speedometer.

  • Andrew Marritt

    Gauges work well on car dashboards because they are easy to read in peripheral vision. However, even then they have disadvantages – namely difficulty to read accurate figures. Anyone who’s ever tried to drive a car where the speedo goes to 300+ kmh and a 3kmh over the speed limit could get you a fine will know this. Even in car dashboards they’re slowly being replaced. An oil warning light has replaced the oil gauge, I have a sequence of lights to tell me when to change gears.

    Business dashboards rarely need to be designed for peripheral vision. The bullet graph is an improvement when no time reference is needed but even that can be overkill. A simple number and a sign if action is needed usually works