Web application dashboards as a tool for data visualization and enrichment

Abstract

Working place of an individual that manages data analysis and data processing can involve one person or a whole team. The tools that can make their job easier, reduce the work hours and ultimately reduce the number of people needed in the team are dashboards of web applications. With the help of dashboards one can manage, analyze and visually monitor their key metrics related to their business or to an individual. There is no universal dashboard to suit every form of business. Equally, there is no universal interface that can be declared as the only suitable solution for all businesses, therefore different dashboards are being developed in different interfaces. Individuals or teams are the users of dashboards. There is a number of dashboard templates for website interfaces that can help developers create their own dashboards for accessible data more easily and quickly. The aim of the paper is to analyze and evaluate various dashboard templates according to the defined criteria in order to demonstrate which template is the most appropriate for a certain domain and field of work. It is expected that the results will help developers with the choice of a dashboard template for their new projects. This paper gives basic guidelines regarding responsive web design and some of the frameworks that can be used to build a responsive web design page. It also briefly describes the CSS Grid. Furthermore, this paper analyzes five different dashboard templates created within four different frameworks and CSS Grid. They were analyzed with five given criteria: the 5 second rule, the inverted pyramid, data visualization, less is more and interactive elements. The results would emphasize the templates created within Bootstrap and Semantic UI because they were not evaluated by any criterion with a score less than 4 out of 5.