Appearance and function match the final product, but is made with different manufacturing methods.

Looks like the final product, but is not functional.

Demonstrates the functionality of the final product, but looks different.

A prototype is a preliminary model of something. Projects that offer physical products need to show backers documentation of a working prototype. This gallery features photos, videos, and other visual documentation that will give backers a sense of what’s been accomplished so far and what’s left to do. Though the development process can vary for each project, these are the stages we typically see:

Dashboard Wireframe Kit



Align users and stakeholders with actionable business insight.

The Dashboard Wireframe Kit is a simple means of extracting business value from data in a form that is easily understandable, to both non-technical and technical people alike, that provides a clear path to action. All while adhering to basic storytelling principles and applying best practices in data visualization and dashboard design.

It teaches anyone how to extract business value from data and frames a clear path to action. Becoming truly data-driven starts here.

The Dashboard Wireframe Kit is the first-of-its-kind in the data and analytics world; a world that has become highly technical, siloed, and digitally enabled. Yet the tangible, human element is muted to the vast swathe of data -- often left to the wayside.

We believe that without the human element in data science, the results are half-baked. Our advanced reasoning and logic is the color needed to complete the data narrative.

The Dashboard Wireframe Kit puts people back at the helm. It is a means of extracting business value from data in a form that is easily understandable and providing a clear path to action -- all the while adhering to essential storytelling principles and applying best practices in data visualization and dashboard design.

The Dashboard Wireframe Kit is a proven and tested means of rapidly wireframing dashboards to align your data with the needs of the business, meet user goals, and achieve actionable outcomes.

Come one, come all -- seasoned data guru or never-touched-data-before -- the Dashboard Wireframe Kit allows you to quickly communicate ideas and test the most complex of concepts.

What's In The Box?

Reuse the Kit Again and Again

The kit is already worth the investment for one dashboard, but we made sure the card quality was high enough that they can be reused with the correct materials. That means you can use the kit for designing multiple dashboards!

The Perfectly Designed Change Agent

Crafted from years of analytics consulting projects, visualization best practices and real-world application.

The Principles of Success Behind the Dashboard Wireframe Kit



Visually Communicate Dashboard Needs (Visual requirements document)

The DWK acts as a common language that both technical and non-technical people can understand. It acts as a bridge between the business and data. People don’t like writing detailed requirements documents; fewer still like reading them. Successfully communicating data insights can be transmitted in a wireframe, which requires a number of key ingredients:

Framing problems in natural language questions

Easy-to-understand layout and display

The factors that cause a chart to change and to incite action

Wireframing is an important first step before moving forward to dashboard development due to the cost and time to build one.

The DWK allows you to quickly communicate ideas and test concepts without having to touch a line of code or even know data visualization best practices. What’s important is what questions you want answered and what behavior you want to change.

Quickly Show Value

Building effective dashboards, and the models that feed them, takes time. Being able to show value early in the consideration process of data-driven decision-making, not only serves to keep people happy but is a key ingredient to ensuring alignment.

Perhaps even more valuable is being able to show wireframes of each proposed version of a dashboard. This can make data quality conversations that bit easier as version 1 of the dashboard may not have many metrics due to a lack quality data but showing a wireframe of version 2 (released 6 months later, for example) can show how an improvement in data quality could impact the dashboard.

Save Time & Reduce Risk

Risks come in many forms during the analytics and dashboard process. Using the DWK to develop and litmus test conceptual wireframes, two of the most common risks can be mitigated by accelerating discussions early in the project:

Failing to deliver on what the project stakeholders are seeking to get answered

Scope creep

Having the visual reference is often the missing link people need to properly conceptualize what they are seeking to learn. A primary reason for scope creep during development is that people are only getting to see something visual during development.

Return on Data Investments

In a Harvard Business Review Pulse survey of 744 executives and managers around the world, only 18% said their organizations are getting a sufficient return on their investment in analytics.

Getting to effective and profitable analytics requires people to be able to act on the insights -- making the data accessible to the user in a form that is valuable to that user.

Using the Dashboard Wireframe Kit, each user wireframes their ideal dashboard and quickly matches it to address their needs. It doesn’t matter if you are not a data pro.

This exercise is a proven and vigorously tested means of rapidly wireframing dashboards that align with needs, goals, and outcomes. There is no other methodology as tried and true as this for proving the ROI of analytics.

Stand Out From The Crowd

With the kit, not only will your dashboards look great, but they will frame the company’s data -- and you -- in a favorable light setting you up for growth opportunities and future success.

Out-of-the-box Dashboard Best Practices

In any industry, establishing and refining best practices is an evolution that takes place over years in the field. With this kit, you will have well-crafted and honed best practices without having to put in the legwork. The kit includes the following best practices that set you up for success:

Maximize insight : Exact elements that are required to apply to visualizations

: Exact elements that are required to apply to visualizations Design : Know what chart works for what instance, and why it matters

: Know what chart works for what instance, and why it matters Actionable data: Ideal setup and configurations so the data displayed is immediately actionable

Wireframe Dashboards Insanely Fast

Whether you are designing for a 1,000 user operational dashboard or one for a small team of five, being able to quickly convey the output is invaluable to gaining alignment. The kit includes physical templates to wireframe and iterate a dashboard within minutes. Take your wireframe and quickly recreate it in Tableau, QlikView, Qlik Sense or Power BI using the provided templates.

Tell Better Data Stories

Storytelling can be a challenge, but when the right amount of art and science is applied to the narrative, it’s the best method of communicating the data wide and far.

The kit structure supports a simple narrative arc that was pioneered by Nicholas Kelly after years of dashboard consulting with the Global Fortune 100.

The simplicity of it means you do not need years of data visualization experience the craft stories from the data.

The dashboard template embeds this effective storytelling process directly into the board. Simply follow the steps on the board. Voila! The hard part of data storytelling is confidently taken care of. Your dashboards will all have a narrative that outlines the actions needed to take to get to a resolution driven by defined goals. Having a story arch built-in makes achieving greater business value that much easier.

Use Cases

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What People Are Saying

How It All Started

The goal was to create a product that brought together business and technical people around getting value from their data.

The idea for the Dashboard Wireframe Kit came from two main influences:

Professional experience in the field

Board games

Firstly, I was designing dashboards and running dashboard workshops for the world’s largest companies. It dawned on me that there was a lot of commonality to the problems they were facing when it came to making their dashboards effective conduits for behavioral change and for getting return on their data investments.

I started experimenting with templates and reusable assets that resulted in a significant reduction in time needed to go through the dashboard design process.

However, it still needed me to be there to facilitate the exchange using whiteboards, sticky notes and big touchscreens. I wanted to remove myself from the equation so people could do the design themselves while adhering to best practices and actionable insight.

I knew the solution needed to be physical, there was enough digital material already and, from my experience, people seemed to enjoy tangible materials.

Secondly, board games have always been a way to bring people together around a common objective. The intent, at least for now, is not to create another run-of-the-mill board game, but to borrow many of the key concepts, not least, the social aspects. The appeal of having a tangible toolbox -- a board, cards and a box -- grew on me. The board game aspect injects fun into a deeply complex and technical field.

Put simply, the board game element makes makes understanding and accessing data a powerful technique achievable to to non-data technical people. Afterall, we can all remember that one up-all-night mind-bending board game that shaped our understanding on of a modern concept.

Several prototypes and hundreds of hours of testing later-- and here we are. We are ready to bring the Dashboard Wireframe Kit to the world and bring insight to the masses.