Dashboards are a special kind of data visualization. They are widely used to monitor website analytics, business intelligence metrics, and brand presence in social media, among many other things. Dashboards are especially difficult to design, because a great amount of information should be displayed in a limited amount of space.

In this chapter, we will define what a dashboard is and discuss some of the strategies and design patterns that can help us design an effective dashboard. We will design and create a dashboard to monitor the performance of students in a class.