Not Always Top-Left: Untangling the Signals that Guide Dashboard Reading Order

Dashboards are widely used interfaces for data analysis, combining multiple visualizations, text, and interactive controls within a single view. While dashboard authors often structure layouts to suggest a logical consumption flow, users may interpret and navigate dashboards differently depending on the interplay between design features, analytical goals, and personal preferences. In this work, we investigate how people make sense of dashboards by examining their reading orders, i.e., the sequen

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ethics.ai (7 August 2026), “Not Always Top-Left: Untangling the Signals that Guide Dashboard Reading Order,” evidence record 17906, https://ethics.ai/record/17906 (originally published by arXiv cs.HC).

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