The Secret to Designing Beautiful Data Dashboards in Tableau

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I have a secret to making dashboards look gorgeous, and I'm about to let you in on it.

The secret is to apply basic UX/UI theories to all if your designs. I do this with almost every dashboard I create, because it gives them a more clean and modern look. 

My no-longer-secret secret includes three main ideas, including:

1. Basic design elements like using an off-white background
2. Grouped “widgets” or worksheets
3. Actionable filter titles

Let’s dive into these three ideas.

Adjust basic design elements like fonts, colors, and spacing

You're probably used to publishing dashboards that look like this to your company's Tableau server:

And, that looks fine. But, we can make it look cleaner.

1. Shrink the titles to 12 and bold them
2. Move all the selectable items to the top
3. Change the dashboard background to #f5f5f5
4. In the layout window:
   • Add a #e6e6e6 boarder to the sheets
   • Change the background to #ffffff
   • Add a 2 pixel buffer to the sheets (default is 1)

That should get you a dashboard that looks more like this:

Shared border around related worksheets

If you have worksheets that are directly related, e.g. they tell the same story, you might want to put a border around them together, like so:

Give parameters and filters actionable titles

I give all parameters and filters actionable titles like “Change Date, Adjust Value, Select Category.”

To achieve this, follow the same steps as above, but instead of applying the formatting at the worksheet level, you’re formatting the layout container holding your two worksheets.

That’s it! That’s how I make my dashboards look clean, modern, and professional. Let us know what you think!