I have a post looking at three visual principles important to creating good dashboards:
In European languages, we read from left to right and from top to bottom. In Middle Eastern languages like Hebrew and Arabic, we read from right to left and top to bottom. In ancient Asian languages (particularly Chinese), we read from top to bottom and right to left, but in modern Chinese, we read left to right and top to bottom. As far as Japanese goes, we read every which way because YOLO. The way we read biases the way we look at things.
There has been quite a bit of research done on looking at where we look on a screen or on a page. I’m going to describe a few layouts, but focusing on research done on Europeans. If you poll a group of Israeli or Saudi Arabian readers, flip the results.
Read the whole thing. The second part of that comes out soon.