Building Interactive Dashboards with JavaScript Charts

When building interactive dashboards with JavaScript charts, you don’t just want to provide the wow factor from a visual perspective. You also want to get stakeholders and end users engaging with the data in a way that helps them unlock the insights they need with ease. Adding interactivity is about enabling users to explore the data independently. To help you build interactive dashboards with JavaScript charts, we’ve got you covered with our hacks and tips from our experienced developers. We’ll also showcase the beneficial features that the SciChart JavaScript chart library supports to help you elevate your designs even further. 

How Do I Make My Dashboard More Interactive with JavaScript?

Dashboards, rather than just single charts, can be more interactive. However, how you design the dashboard is important. 

Knowing your way around the properties will help you create JavaScript dashboards that simultaneously look great and perform well. The ChartModifier API lets you change plenty of elements to add interactivity to your charts, and we’re sharing some popular examples.

Tooltips

A UI element, tooltips provide additional guidance and help users take action. They provide messages for users to learn more about the data they’re seeing.

Themes

Themes let you create JavaScript chart dashboards that are on-brand and unique. SciChart offers a built-in light and dark theme, but we also cater to custom themes, so you can go wild with your designs. Prefer to inherit a built-in theme and make it all your own. With SciChart, you can also override certain elements within our ready-built themes, a time-saving way to create the exact data visualizations you require. For example, you have the power to change the gridline colors or the gradient background.

Annotations

Annotations are a powerful way to communicate information with users. It’s also a way to reduce fatigue when consuming data—it’s generally best practice to offer multiple elements so that the visualization isn’t too one-dimensional. It helps keep users engaged. 

Zooming & Panning

Zooming and panning gives users the ultimate ability to zoom in on the real-time data. With SciChart’s flexibility, you can modify the chart to include the design elements and behaviors that you need. It’s also possible to synchronize multiple charts. 

User Experience (UX) Best Practices

• Why not tell a story? Use annotations and callouts to highlight important metrics and emphasize recent changes. With SciChart’s feature-rich annotations API, you can select from an abundance of boxes, markers, text labels, and custom shapes. You can even create your own!
• Use color consistently across different dashboard views. It will help prevent users from getting distracted with unnecessary changes, and help you stay on brand. To help you pick consistent colors across multiple series, you can take advantage of our Auto Coloring feature, which lets developers automatically choose colors from a pre-set palette.
• Don’t forget to make the views adjustable for your user so they can lock in on the data that matters to them and feel engaged—can they zoom in and out or pan, for instance? This lets users pinpoint the insights they’re looking for more easily.
• A JavaScript framework can help you build web applications and user interfaces that work across browsers, operating systems, and hardware devices. SciChart is one of the few truly cross-platform chart libraries, meaning you can build charts for multiple platforms without limitations to the performance and presentation of your data visualizations.
• Don’t be afraid to add space between elements and charts. This helps avoid feeling overwhelmed by the visualizations. You want to intuitively draw the user to the information they’re seeking without putting them off with too much clutter in a small space.

Explore JavaScript User Manual

What Is the Best Library to Create Beautiful, Interactive JavaScript Chart Dashboards?

Chart libraries like SciChart.js can help data scientists and developers build better interactive chart dashboards. Do they offer more customizations and flexibility? Do they perform better? Are they more stable even when processing high volumes of data? The answer is yes to all three of these questions. 

With SciChart, it’s not about style over substance. Built by developers for developers, we provide the best JavaScript charts with real-time data updates, even with millions of data points across multiple chart series. There’s also no lag, even on a lower-grade hardware device. That’s thanks to our 64-bit library. 

Plus, the support SciChart offers helps developers move forward more quickly with their projects. From hundreds of documentations, community forum questions, examples, and demos, we even have a responsive developer support team. 

Ready to make your charts more interactive without using too much of your internal resources?

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SciChart Dashboard Demos & Examples

Below, we’ve included some of our most popular JavaScript dashboard demos to showcase the rich features and visuals you can leverage when you build chart dashboards with SciChart.js.

Server Traffic Dashboard Demo

Oil & Gas Dashboard Demo

Multiple JavaScript Chart Dashboard