I once read an anecdote about how doctors and nurses at a particular hospital used a shorthand on a patient’s chart to communicate quickly and efficiently. A stick figure representing the patient would be drawn on the corner of the chart, and various abbreviations and symbols would indicate symptoms, ailments or responses to treatment in a constrained format and constrained space.

Recently, we ran into a use case where a client wanted more and more status information visible on their information dashboard. This dashboard is a literal scoreboard for a newspaper, tracking sports game progress and submitted information like newsfeeds, photos and editorial review. We were out of room but needed eight more status fields.

In Information Dashboard Design, Stephen Few describes one of the supporting attributes of dashboards as having “small, concise, clear, and intuitive display mechanisms… If something