Having studied data visualization
and dashboard design for many years, I had been programmed to regard screen space
in a very particular way.
You may have seen something similar
to this picture before:
According to this, the upper left
part of your screen (or dashboard) should always contain your most important
data, or what you hope to emphasize.
Others describe the layout in terms
of following the shape of the letter “Z”. The upper left is the most important,
followed by the upper right, then the lower left and then the lower right
accordingly.
With this in mind, I have always
pushed my filters out to the right of my visualizations. This made sense
thinking strictly about the approaches above.
Then someone challenged me on this,
saying “Go out on the web and find me a site that has the filtering or
navigation on the right side of the screen.”
Although there are plenty of
exceptions, the majority of websites have these controls on the left side of
the screen. Almost as if to say, “Here, Right Here, This is where you tell me
what you want to see!!!”
Try it for yourself. Facebook.com, CNN.com, Gmail.com and even most internal corporate sites have
the controls placed strategically on the left side of the screen, consuming at
least a portion of the “Emphasized” quadrant.
So while approaches like the ones I
had read over and over again are still very valuable in terms of where to place
each visualization, User Experience
should never be overlooked. For this reason, I have started designing most of my dashboards with the filters
on the left.
Cheers,
Kevin Taylor
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