30. Context

What provides appropriate context?

Make sure to list the following to provide full context for the content of your dashboard.

1. Name of the datasource
   
2. Contact for questions
   
3. Critical calculations
   
4. Who built the dashboard
   
5. Who else contributed in a meaningful way
   
6. Who to contact with questions
   
7. The full date range
   
8. List latest how recently the data was refreshed
   
9. The next time the data will be refreshed
   
10. Calculations details and/or Units of Measure

    A good question to ask yourself is “How could someone get confused by this?

What needs to be added to make sure the context is clear

Other Considerations regarding Text

• Alignment
• Fonts
• Font-weight
• Color
• Size
  *Text hierarchy.

It is now time to organize the text intuitively in our display. This could be alignment, fonts, font-weight, color, and size are just a few things to think about. One tool we’ll leverage heavily is a text hierarchy. It is best to keep it simple with one color and maybe only a couple fonts (one purely for text and the other for KPIs and the like). When differentiating text from one another don’t change too much from one style to another.

Examples of Annotation

Check out the various dashboards designed by visual designers on vizforsocialgood.com.