Developing a "tiled" dashboard for one of my clients, I am considering the employment of "text-based summary" in lieu of absolute figures.
For those unfamiliar with a "tiled" dashboards, below is an example dashboard by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Juice Analytics, in their publication "A Guide to Creating Dashboards People Love to Use", briefly discuss the use of what they refer to as "Text-based Summary" with the example (credited to WebTrends) attached below. Their description is as follows:
Text-based summary: Automatically generated textual description of the key information in the dashboard. This can be as simple as a sentence that includes a couple important data points.
I found the example to be quite verbose and not well suited to the simplicity of the tiled layout. I have been playing around with an example for revenue against forecast, and have come up with the following:
However, this solution still seems inefficient as the figures still do not communicate their meaning effectively. Moreover, the more data present in each tile, the less clear the message becomes.
Can anyone provide some suggestions to better highlight the key information being presented in this summary at a glance, whilst also communicating the relationships between the figures?