Guidelines for mobile design

If you know that your dashboards will be viewed on mobile devices, consider these guidelines:

  • For best practice, focus on what matters for a real-world use case. Keep it simple.
  • Guidelines for Visual Design:
    • Place the most important dashlet at the top left of the dashboard page.
    • Reports are displayed from left to right and top to bottom.
    • Design for thumbs. Make any filters easy to tap.
    • For increased usability and navigation, minimize the number of dashlets on a dashboard page.
    • Avoid legends and redundant labels that distract from the focus of the chart.
    • Consider reducing the size of large fonts that can take too much room on a small screen.
    • Think about zooming and when users would zoom in or out.
    • Design at a screen resolution of 1024 px by 768 px for best results on a tablet device.
    • On a phone device, KPIs, charts, and tables stack vertically for scrolling, with KPIs at the top.

To achieve maximum performance on a mobile device, consider these guidelines:

  • Use as many required reports on a dashboard, and no more.
  • Use Visualizer reports. Visualizer has better support for offline viewing and is being optimized for faster load times.
  • Use Visualizer Turbo Charts for faster chart rendering. Turbo Charts are enabled in the mobile settings by default.
  • Keep the layout on one screen, above the dotted line in dashboard edit mode. This is also called a virtual page.
  • Use low cardinality filters. Reduce the number of filter values that have to be downloaded. Providing only the relevant filter values also improves the user experience.
  • Use standard filters instead of embedded filters. Embedded filters take up more screen space and therefore take longer to render. If you do use embedded filters, limit them to only a few values.
  • Avoid using tables with more than 12 columns. Smaller tables load faster and do not require scrolling.
  • Avoid chartjunk and use the best chart for the data. Most analysis can be performed with line, column, bar, and scatter charts.
  • Teach your users how to sync the dashboards while online and use them offline.
  • Enable and use Delay Charting to apply and select filters before a dashboard is rendered, saving you time and improving mobile performance. You can enable or disable Delay Charting on each dashboard when in Edit mode so that the dashboard filters, images, buttons, and text fields are displayed before the dashboard is fully rendered.