6 design principles for top dashboards: Understanding design

How to optimise your dashboard with the psychology of perception

Without us realising it, websites, programs and apps influence our perception and therefore our actions too. The reason is that they were designed in a particular way and followed certain rules — the Gestalt principles.
In this blog post we use illustrative examples to show you how these design principles help you build an appealing and understandable dashboard. The examples are easy to follow and explain the core elements of successful design.
In our blog post Ultimate guide to choosing the right metrics for an effective dashboard we have already shown you how to tell important information and metrics on your dashboard from unimportant ones, so you can tailor the dashboard to your target group's needs. And in Dashboard design basics we gave you a first set of design tips for the perfect dashboard. Today it is about the design principles that take your dashboard design to the next level.

The origin of the Gestalt principles

The Gestalt principles offer a psychological approach to how the human brain senses and organises visual information. The theory behind them was developed in the 1910s and 1920s by the German psychologist Max Wertheimer and his colleagues. It has since found its way into a range of fields, design theory among them.
The Gestalt principles deal with the perception of coherent objects and rest on the fact that people draw on experience when processing information. When we look at a painting, for example, we do not see individual brushstrokes but the picture as a whole.
So once graphic designers understand how viewers interpret visual information, they can use the Gestalt principles deliberately to bring out visual relationships and communicate more effectively.

Which principles matter for dashboard design, and what do they say?

In Gestalt psychology, human perception is described as the ability to identify structures and ordering principles in sensory impressions. These are captured in the so-called Gestalt principles. They explain why we see graphics as meaningful groupings rather than as an accumulation of pixels and dots. There are several dozen such principles — the six most important ones for designing a dashboard are set out below.

Principle of similarity

Elements on your dashboard can be identical or similar in colour, shape, size or orientation.
Elements that are similar are grouped by our perception and read as belonging together. At the same time, elements that differ in their characteristics are read as independent of one another.

Principle of proximity

Spatial proximity can make elements act as part of a unit. Use that on your dashboard by placing related items close together.
Incidentally, the Gestalt principles can also cancel each other out. Elements that sit close together are often perceived as part of a group even when they look different.

Principle of focal point

By deliberately emphasising one feature, individual elements can be set apart from the rest of your dashboard. Work with colour or with variation in the size of the elements, for example, to bring them forward.

Principle of continuity

The brain automatically completes missing lines and carries on meaningful continuations. That is why we tend to perceive objects arranged along a continuous line as belonging together, in contrast to other figures. It is also the reason why table rows and columns are recognisable as such even without dividing lines.

Principle of common region

Elements that lie within a common region are seen as belonging together. As soon as you place a frame or a visual boundary around individual elements — coloured areas or contour lines, for instance — the grouping changes.

Principle of connectedness

Elements that are connected to one another are perceived as a single unit. The principle of connectedness can outweigh the principles of proximity and similarity. It lets you assign individual dashboard elements to one another easily, for example to show sequences of different process steps.

Should you apply every design principle when designing dashboards?

Clearly not. But keep in mind how the psychology of design works in the human brain and what effect it can have on the viewer. So rather than distributing and arranging the elements on your dashboard at random, ask yourself beforehand:

• Which elements belong together?
• What is particularly important and needs to be emphasised?
• What is the hierarchy behind the individual pieces of information?

Your checklist: did you remember everything? Here is a short checklist to help you memorise the points and put them into practice straight away:

• Know your elements: be clear about which elements belong together and which are important.
• Obey the laws: like it or not, the Gestalt principles work. Better, then, to use them consciously and avoid unintended associations.
• Two heads are better than one: ask for feedback and check whether your dashboard really carries the message you want to convey.