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Continuum Instructor Resources

Topic Category: DATAAVS 210 Unit 1

Lesson 01: Readings

Read and review the following articles. They will help you understand the topics for this week and prepare for your in-class discussions, activities and assignment.

Required Readings

Visualization Project Management

Recommended Readings

Dashboards

  1. The Art and Science of Effective Dashboard Design by Microsoft: A short guide on dashboard design by Microsoft
  2. Ten Dashboard Design Principles To Make Your Data Speak: A collection of design tips to build good visualizations
  3. The Nine Principles of Killer Dashboards – on SlideShare by Salesforce
  4. Dashboard Design Principles by Juice Analytics: An in-depth description of design principles, along with examples, to develop highly effective dashboards. Also talks about how different companies/apps/projects solved their visualization challenges.
  5. Dashboard Layout and Design by Tableau: A short little guide developed by Tableau (a BI platform). Although we are not using Tableau in this course, this short read is definitely worth the time.

KPIs or Metrics

  1. eCommerce KPIs (Google Analytics) by OptimizeSmart: This is a really good article to get an overview of different types of KPIs (or metrics) used in the Web Analytics, specifically, Google Analytics (GA). GA is a tool that many websites of all sizes use to track their web traffic. There are many metrics that one can derive using this data and this article talks about most of the commonly used ones.
  2. Short and sweet intro to Software Development KPIs by StickyMinds: This is a really short and totally on-point article that talks about three basic types of KPIs used in Software Development and the reasoning behind using them.
  3. Seven Dirty Little Truths about Metrics by Hank Marquis: The title says it all. Hank shares some of the “secrets” about metrics. These are some in-depth insights that analysts learn by trial and error. Some of these “pitfalls” seem quite obvious to foresee but that doesn’t make them uncommon. It’s definitely worth the time to read this article which will essentially make you aware of these pitfalls before you are in one.
  4. Some Analyst Humor: Must See!!!!