- Hey, everyone.
This is Andreea for measureschool.com.
And today I'm going to walk you through some basic tools
that you can use to take your Google Data Studio dashboards
from good to great.
There's nothing wrong with creating a dashboard
that looks like a template,
but I'm sure you want to create something
that tells your data story better,
that has greater visuals and a better functionality.
The first tools might not be what you would have expected.
Can you guess what they are?
They're actually pen and paper.
Okay, maybe you don't have to go all analog
and you can opt for an online document.
What is the purpose of this document?
This is probably the starting point
that is the most important part of your dashboard.
You have to create a document
and write down as many questions as possible
about this dashboard:
Who will use this?
What is the goal of this dashboard?
What are you trying to achieve
with the data you will visualize?
What are you currently struggling with
when it comes to looking at this data?
And of course, what are the most important metrics
for your business?
And about the pen and paper part,
there's also the possibility to create a sketch
that will help you prioritize the charts on the dashboard
and understand what you need for it.
Once you answer all these questions,
it's time to start thinking
about what types of charts to use
in order to deliver the needed story.
Two great tools for this are Dataviz Project
and Dataviz Catalogue.
But because these tools have hundreds of charts covered
that might not be available in Data Studio,
I recommend that you do a back and forth
between looking at the charts available in Data Studio
and the charts that Dataviz Project and Dataviz Catalogue.
Both of these tools have a great feature.
You can filter by what you want to obtain with your data.
Let's say you want to visualize
a part of a variable to its total,
like cost out of the total budget, for example,
or how many five star reviews you have
out of the total reviews.
So let's go to Dataviz Catalogue and select Part-to-a-whole,
and we will see the charts that they recommend.
We go back to Data Studio
and we see that we have the pie charts, the donut charts,
but we also see that one of the recommendations
is a sunburst diagram.
Keep in mind that Data Studio also has the option
of adding components built by third-party developers
in this section here,
Community Visualizations and Components.
And we will see that we have the sunburst available.
Now that you've decided on what charts you will use,
you can think of the general look and feel
of your future dashboard.
So step three is design and UX inspiration tools.
One tool that I use is dribbble.com.
You go here, you search for dashboards
and you select a timeframe,
maybe this past year or this past month,
and you select the dashboard
that you think is new and innovative and get inspired by it.
However, I recommend that you pay close attention
to this one, to Dribbble, or other design inspiration tools,
because some work here is too focused on catchy designs
and doesn't offer context
or focus on the data's goals for the business.
Step four for taking your dashboards from good to great
is choosing a good color pallette.
When it comes to colors,
you should think of your dashboard as part of your brand
or your client's brand
if you're building this dashboard for a client.
But the dashboard might need more colors than a brand uses,
especially when you want
to differentiate dimensions, for example.
So how do you find colors that go well together
with the one or two colors a brand might have?
Coolors is a great tool for that.
Add your brand colors, lock them.
So let's say this is another one of my brand colors,
I can lock this color and then I will hit the Space Bar
and it will generate complimentary colors
that go well together with mine,
you can also add more if you want them.
if you have more dimensions in Data Studio
where you need them.
Make sure, if you have strong colors,
to you use maybe a more pale pallette here.
And then go to Data Studio and under Theme level,
Customize your dimensions or your chart pallette.
As you've probably seen by now,
the prep work before actually starting
to build your dashboard is significant.
And there is one more important step to it, the mock-ups.
You can create them directly in Data Studio,
or you can use designated tools like InVision or Figma.
The mock-ups are important for these two reasons;
you can present your work, your thought process,
the decisions you made regarding the charts
in the dashboards structure.
And the second reason is that,
if you create them in Figma or in InVision,
you can get feedback with the help of pinned comments
directly on specific charts.
Let's replace this with new users.
And you can get to that need that the client has
for that dashboard.
If you create them in Data Studio,
I recommend that you export them as PDF
and upload them to Drive so that a similar system,
pinned comment system,
can be used by your client or by your team
to give them their feedback here.
All right, folks, that was it for today.
I hope you found this video helpful.
See you in the next one.
- All right, thanks Andreea for this great information.
If this video helped you out in any way,
then hit that Like button
and also check out this playlist right over here
where we have more interesting topics on Data Studio
and data visualization.
Now, from everybody here at MeasureSchool, happy measuring.