LayoutHow does it guide the eye?
Grid layout
Equal tiles, one per site, team or metric, so like can be compared with like at a glance.
Example dashboard
Click a widget to see its data
Warehouse SLA today
Share of orders shipped within SLA
Target 95%Share
Lyon
Rotterdam
Madrid
Milan
Leeds
Poznań
The data model behind it
Order fulfilment eventsEach tile runs the same query with a different warehouse filter. Small multiples are a layout of one query per member of a dimension, here dim_warehouse.
- Tables read
- 2 of 4
- Joins
- 1
- Fact type
- Transaction fact (event stream)
- Grain
- One row per order status change
- Refresh
- Streaming, under a minute
Widgets
Highlighted: every table this view reads. Pick a widget to isolate its query.
Where it sits in the taxonomy
Every tile has the same size and weight and no element is primary. There is no reading order: the eye goes to the outlier, and comparing tiles is the point.
- Does one visual take most of the page?No
- Do all panels have the same size and weight?Yes, like tiles
- Grid layout
At a glance
- Density
- Medium to high, but uniform
- First look
- Wherever something turns red
- Reading order
- Free: outliers first
- Put there
- The same metric on the same scale, one tile per entity
Not to be confused with
- Inverted pyramid layout
- The pyramid ranks content from summary to detail. A grid refuses to rank.
- Single-focus layout
- Single focus gives one view most of the space. A grid gives every view the same.
How to recognise it
- Identical tile sizes
- The same chart repeated for different entities (small multiples)
Use it for
- Monitoring many similar units: stores, warehouses, services
Avoid it for
- A story with a beginning and an end