My goal: Create another infographic on social media that merits your attention!

Thanks for the shout-out! This sample was designed to expose a broader audience to the concept of a dashboard.

I think your definition is correct, from a functional perspective. Dashboards are indeed a collection of one or more visualizations fed from some sort of data source – and many are indeed interactive. Changing parameters or filters is one of many examples of interactivity.

They exist to offer some of the most critical information people in all sorts of roles need to make decisions, laid out within the confines of a screen. Organizations everywhere are dealing with increasingly-large volumes of complex data, sometimes with rows numbering in the billions. Computers may be great at storing and processing this amount of data, but unfortunately humans are not.

Dashboards provide a way for people to leverage that wealth of data and only display the metrics that are most critical, at a glance, while intuitively offering more details on demand. This form of brevity allows us to deal with the limits of our working memory, and these key, important metrics are known in my industry as “key performance indicators”. I suppose it is primarily used for business applications, although variations and permutations of dashboards are showing up everywhere. My online banking portal has a great dashboard, for example, that concisely gives me a great overview of my finances, where my money is being spent, how it compares to the budgets I’ve set for myself, etc.

Data visualization is an obvious method of presenting these metrics in a concise manner, if properly harnessed. It allows a broader range of people to understand complicated data and relationships by leveraging the power of our brain’s ability to perceive and process visual information.

At any rate, I hope this is helpful. Great work with your site, and best regards.