TFN#48: 🪜5 mistakes I avoid while designing my dashboards

Reader, If you tell me you haven’t seen a dashboard in your career so far, I won’t believe you. You wouldn’t believe yourself.

The ease with which data visualization tools are available, it is impossible to believe that you would be spared from a dashboard.

Mostly, this is how the tragedy of dashboards looks like:

If I’m calling it a tragedy, I may not be holding a favourable view of most dashboard practices. And I would like to share a few of them before we move ahead.

Problems with most dashboards

Three glaring problems that make dashboards frustrating:

1. Treated as the cure to all problems

Creating dashboards does not substitute problem-solving. It is like looking at a compass on a stranded boat and waiting to reach a nearby shore. On its own. Well-designed dashboards can guide where to look, but they can’t act as a cure.

2. Only for managers

There is a whole new clan of dashboard hierarchy that depends on earning a living based on dashboard-dictated work and meetings. A traditional manager or a supervisor was expected to know the work inside out and provide feedback where necessary. However, the emergence of dashboard managers is a new phenomenon. Companies cannot generate money with pseudo-workers. And they’re realizing it slowly.

3. Gap between decision-maker and a decision

Most dashboards are far from the user’s immediate decision-making power. If I can’t change a feature on a product, I don’t need to know which features are used by the customers. My dashboard should prioritize insights that help my immediate decision-making. Good-to-know things can wait.

In a way, these three are also mistakes that I try to avoid. But let’s get on to the five mistakes that I reallyyy try to avoid.

The five mistakes I try to avoid

Providing decimal-level information aka trying to be accurate

Dashboards are to understand trends. They do not require military precision. So, if a Gender-bifurcation pie chart says 45.6% women and 54.4% men, what am I going to do with that .6 and .4?

Ignoring tables

It is not necessary to have only colourful charts on dashboards. Tables are one of the best visual tools to summarize information. Add tables wherever it feels natural to add tables.

Trying to give all teeny-tiny details

That’s not the purpose. An overview of information is more than enough for a smart decision-maker to ask valid questions or sieve through data.

People who are really interested and invested in knowing the full picture, usually get their hands dirty by asking for full data.

Objectifying subjective matter

Sometimes, it is simply not possible to do it. And should not be done. Whoever is interested, should take interest. Also, thanks to the onset of new AI tools, this work is now even easier than before.

That reminds me of the Prichard Scale of Understanding Poetry covered in the movie Dead Poets Society. The Prichard Scale tries to evaluate the “greatness” of the poem. How ridiculous is that!

​Source​

Treating Dashboard as a god, the ultimate piece of truth

Because dashboards reflect the underlying databases and calculations. There are more ways to structure bad databases than there are to structure good databases. This also means that most of the databases are not perfect. Their shortcomings are reflected in dashboards. If people find something wrong with the dashboards, it is an opportunity to look at how we are processing data. And improve the dashboards.

That’s five. And I have a few more, but then you’ll think I’m pitching against creating dashboards at all. Which will cost me future work too.😄

So, tell me which mistakes have you seen in your dashboards? Do you have any deal-breaker things that you never want to use in your dashboards? Mine is using too many graph types.

Hit Reply and share it with me.

Reads of the week:

Does intelligence add to more human worth and virtue?

It is difficult to condense the message discussed in this thread, but Charles Murray is clear that there is no correlation between intelligence, virtue and human worth.

But we have been organizing society in a manner where it is increasingly insinuated that a surgeon’s life is more than an insurance salesman’s.