Product design
Data visualisation
Dashboard

Demographics Survey Dashboard

GlobalWebIndex’s Pro Platform is an analytics tool used by agencies, brands and publishers to understand consumer behaviour.

Working closely with the GlobalWebIndex team, we designed a new dashboard feature that made its extensive audience data easier to explore, interpret and share.

Role: Product Designer & Co-Founder, Studio.Info
Client: GlobalWebIndex
Date: 2016

GlobalWebIndex dashboard cards showing audience charts and data visualisations — The dashboard brought high-level audience insights into a single, shareable view.

Making complex data easier to understand

The Pro Platform already supported detailed audience analysis, but lacked a simple way to surface and communicate high-level insights.

Through initial workshops with the GlobalWebIndex team, we identified an opportunity to introduce a dashboard that made commonly used insights more accessible without requiring users to perform a full analysis each time.

The aim was to create a simpler, more immediate way for clients to understand their audiences and regularly return to the platform.

GlobalWebIndex dashboard showing audience segments, charts and purchase activity data

Designing the right chart for the data

One of the main design challenges was determining which visualisation best communicated each type of metric.

The appropriate chart depended not only on whether the underlying value was a number, percentage or distribution, but also on the question the user was trying to answer. Choosing the right visual form was essential because the way an insight was presented could directly influence how it was interpreted.

For example, the Index metric compares an audience against the global average, so we used distance from a central point to communicate whether an audience was more or less likely to exhibit a particular behaviour.

We developed a charting system covering a range of common analytical patterns:

Annotated radial chart explaining benchmark values, data metrics and chart segments

Pie chart wireframes showing an audience percentage distribution — **Percent distribution:** Used to understand how an audience is distributed across a set of values.

Line chart wireframes showing audience behaviour across time waves — **Time waves:** Used to show how behaviour changes over time.

Diverging bar chart wireframes comparing data points against an average index — **Diverging average:** Used to compare an audience against a benchmark or global average.

Radial area chart wireframes comparing the relative size of audience data points — **Universe scale:** Used to communicate the relative size of an audience.

Comparing audiences

Analysis often involved more than one target audience, so the visualisation system also needed to make comparisons easy to understand.

We created a dedicated charting palette separate from GlobalWebIndex’s core brand colours. Colours were automatically assigned to audiences and carried consistently across every chart type.

This created a simple visual language that made it easier to scan a dashboard, follow an audience across multiple visualisations and compare groups at a glance.

Primary and audience charting colour palettes used across the GlobalWebIndex dashboard

Dashboard charts displaying data for a single audience — Single audience

Dashboard charts comparing data for multiple audiences — Multiple audience

Building custom dashboards

The final part of the experience focused on making dashboards easy for the GlobalWebIndex team to configure for individual clients.

Because the team already understood the underlying datasets, we designed a guided workflow that allowed them to connect each dashboard widget to the relevant data and select the appropriate visualisation.

Rather than presenting every configuration option at once, we broke the process into a series of dependent steps. Each choice determined what appeared next, reducing complexity and creating a faster, more focused dashboard-building experience.