Dashboard Week, Day 2 - A Sales Dashboard for People with Dyscalculia
Today’s project was both important and personally meaningful for me, as I belong to the neurodivergent community. The focus was on inclusivity—re-designing a sales performance dashboard specifically for users with Dyscalculia.
Dyscalculia, a condition affecting the ability to understand numbers, impacts tasks like handling money, telling time, and managing percentages. In the UK alone, it affects around 17 million adults. As designers, it's essential to consider how to create dashboards that don’t overwhelm users who face these challenges.
The Challenge: A Dense Dashboard
The original dashboard was packed with numbers—KPIs on transactions, active clients, multi-digit sales figures, and time-based data like weeks, quarters, and running totals. With 16 elements squeezed into one screen, it was overwhelming, especially for users who struggle with numeracy.
The Solution: Simplifying and Adding Context
The key to redesigning the dashboard was to break it into smaller, more digestible sections. By spacing out the information and focusing on one chart at a time, the experience becomes less daunting. Here’s what I did to reduce the numerical overload:
- Added contextual labels like “days” and “Million” to numbers for clarity.
- Removed decimal places and numeric axis labels, replacing them with reference lines.
- Swapped abbreviations like "Q1" for clearer terms like "Quarter 1."
- Changed the week number axis to “Week 1, Week 2,” adding meaning to the data.
- Removed numbers directly from charts, leaving only reference lines and bar visuals, with full details in the tooltips.
- Introduced gridlines, coloured headers, and banding to visually separate sections and reduce clutter.
The Impact
Each of these changes made the dashboard easier to read and navigate. By adding more white space, context, and simplifying visual elements, we reduced the cognitive load for those with Dyscalculia. But what struck me most was that these improvements didn’t just benefit people with numeracy challenges—they made the dashboard clearer for everyone.
A Broader Lesson in Inclusivity
While today’s focus was Dyscalculia, it reminded me that there are many ways to make our visualisations more accessible, whether for ADHD, Autism, visual impairment, or motor skill difficulties. The inclusivity principles applied here should become part of our default approach, rather than an afterthought.
This project showed that designing with empathy not only fosters inclusivity but also improves the overall quality of our work. Learning to incorporate these steps from the start will ultimately make the data visualisation world a better, more welcoming space for all users.