Overview: Dashboards

Introduction

Dashboards are a special reporting module within SurveyOptic which combines the powerful reporting options found in the dynamic, table and text reports, with custom display and formatting options and further analysis and reporting tools.

Dashboards can be used to create reports that are insightful, on-brand and on-message.

How they work

Dashboards are built from a collection of ‘widgets’ which can be arranged and formatted. These widgets can contain text ‘copy’, graphical reporting, html, or a mixture of these elements. Using these elements, custom reports can be built to suit analytical, visual and aesthetic requirements. Dashboards can report on data from any survey or template in the system. Where appropriate, dashboards can report on data from multiple sources (for example multiple related surveys).

Common use cases

Custom Survey Report

One common use case for dashboards is creating 1-off ‘custom reports’ for a survey or consultation. Often this report will match company branding and may be aimed at a particular group such as an organisation’s board or SLT. A custom report is often built following initial data analysis so it can be designed to focus on the main findings of the survey or consultation. In some cases, this approach is taken a step further to create multiple reports. This way reports can be created for different stakeholder groups such as different organisational levels (eg. SLT, departments, sites etc).

Repeatable custom reports

In cases where a survey is repeated numerous times, dashboards can be used to create consistent repeatable reports. The most common example of this is where a template is used to create the same survey for different users. Dashboards can be used to create a custom report that displays the unique survey data in a consistent repeatable report. This approach is often used for ‘diagnostic’ type surveys and surveys which are used in a repeated business process.

Live dashboards

Dashboards can be used as a place for users to visit when wanting to see the stats of a survey, consultation or form over a period of time. Often these types of dashboard will focus on key stats, in the case of a form these could be the number of submitted applications, applications in progress and top-level details of applications such as organisation names.