Designing dashboards to be consumed on different types of devices in Spotfire®

I sometimes get the question "What should we think about when we are developing dashboards that will be consumed on different device types?" Often, this means that the dashboards will be consumed on Desktop and Laptop computers, of various screen sizes, but in addition they will also will be consumed on Tablets and/or Mobile phones. In some cases, the same DXP file will also be used to embed Spotfire^® visualizations in a web portal, a so called web mashup.

Lets start by looking at each of the consumption modes separately:

Mobile ? there are guidelines available, for what to consider when developing mobile dashboards on the Spotfire Community. It is especially important to consider the page navigation; often it is necessary to put links or buttons in text areas, or to use KPI charts, to help the user move between pages. The iOS App does have a native page navigation control, so if users are on an iPhone or iPad, this may suffice.

On small devices (like phones), there is a need to make sure that there are not too many visualizations on the screen at the same time, since that would make them too hard to read. The feature "minimum page size" lets the author create pages that allow a phone user to look at one or a few visualizations at a time, and scroll more visualizations into view, while users on an iPad or a computer can see more, or all, visualizations at once.

Portals ? there is a lot of freedom for the author when choosing what contents from a DXP file to display. Since version 7.5, Spotfire supports "Multiple document views" that let the author freely mix Spotfire content with his own web content. The web mashup API lets the user configure what options to display in embedded pages, such as page navigation, filter panel, etc. Read more here.

Web player ? this is the "normal" consumption mode, and general good practices when designing dashboards apply. To make a dashboard visually pleasing, remove unused legend components and consider using the visual themes and color schemes of Spotfire. See this article for some inspiration.