Design Captivating Enterprise Dashboards Using a Style Guide

If you’re looking for dashboard design inspiration or want to learn how to design and develop enterprise dashboards that will captivate your users, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, I provide a sample UI style guide that will show everyone in your organization, from Business Intelligence architects and developers to business users, how to create beautiful enterprise dashboards, mobile BI applications, or data visualizations.

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What is a UI style guide?

A user interface (UI) style guide is a living document that contains a set of rules and visual styles used in the design and formatting of documents, websites, and applications. These visual styles include, but are not limited to, fonts, colors, logos, graphs, icons, layouts, tables, buttons, selectors, and their strategic placement.

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How do I use a UI style guide?

By formatting your dashboards and data visualizations with the fonts, colors, layout, graph types, and conditional formatting provided in the UI style guide. If the style and formatting rules are correctly implemented, you should be able to develop captivating enterprise dashboards.

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Whether your organization uses MicroStrategy, SAP Business Objects, Tableau, Domo, or Microsoft Power BI as the business intelligence tool, using a style guide in your Business Intelligence projects will guarantee consistency across all of your organization’s data visualizations.

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Below is a style guide example. This is the UI style guide I use for my personal branding and website. Feel free to use it on your next Business Intelligence project, data visualization, or mobile BI application.

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UI style guide example:

‍Click here to download a PDF document of the Business Intelligence Style Guide

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* More dashboard color palettes

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* How to choose the right graph for your data

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Helpful Links: IBM Data Visualization Guidelines