I am working on a new web application that will have a user dashboard displaying lots of great information with charts, notifications, alerts, etc. The actual data populating the charts will not be entered by the user, but will reflect activity over time (days, weeks, months) based on user activity.
I am aware of a lot of best practices for dashboard creation, but one area I am not sure about is how to show a new user that has just signed up an example of what they could see down the line (i.e. a 'full state'). It is fairly anticlimactic to go through a long sign-up process and then stare at an empty dashboard.
Are there any suggestions or techniques?
Answer
Three assumptions to address this question:
Customer who is already using your product, should by now have some idea on what kind of reporting he/she will be getting.
Additionally, you will for sure have some screenshots on your website and sample reports in your FAQ and Knowledge Base areas.
Lastly, I'm assuming that your reports are dynamic, or at least updates once a day.
Based on these assumptions, putting a sample data in the reports page is not a good idea. Because:
The minute you have new data, you are going to replace sample data. Usually your new data won't be much, so the reports will still look empty.
Sample vs Actual reports might somehow disappoint your users. Because sample report might look very ideal and beautiful, but their actual data in the beginning might look not very impressive.
Displaying a sample data, and making it disabled or in the greyed image form might actually confuse the users even more. Because by default users are expected to see the real reports on that particular page (even if empty). So displaying them static content might give the impression that they are viewing FAQ page rather than reports page.
I therefore, of the opinion that actual reports should be shown first, even if they will be empty at the beginning.
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