Building
How to build dashboards
This is what I do all day: systems and dashboards that give an organisation one version of the truth. Most dashboards fail for the same ten reasons.
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Start with the decision, not the data.
If nobody changes what they do because of a number, that number does not belong on the dashboard. Ask “what will you do differently on Monday?” before you write a line of SQL.
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Interview the people who’ll open it.
Not the person who commissioned it. The three people who’ll have it up on a second monitor at 8am have a completely different set of questions, and theirs are the ones that matter.
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One source of truth, first.
Two dashboards that disagree destroy trust in both, permanently. Fix the pipeline and the definitions before you make anything pretty -- you cannot design your way out of contradictory numbers.
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Five numbers above the fold.
A screen with thirty tiles is a screen nobody reads. Pick the five that answer “is this healthy?” and push everything else one click down.
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Every number needs a comparison.
£40,000 is trivia. £40,000, up 12% on last month and 4% under target, is information. A bare figure makes the reader do work they will not do.
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Name the metric what the business calls it.
If the floor says “time to hire”, the tile says time to hire, not “req_cycle_duration_avg”. Your schema is not the user interface.
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Show how fresh it is.
A visible “updated 6:04am” prevents the single most damaging question a dashboard can face, which is “is this current?” asked in a meeting with no answer.
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Design for the phone.
Executives look at dashboards in the back of taxis. If the top three numbers don’t survive a 375px screen, they don’t survive at all.
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Kill the charts nobody opens.
Log the usage and be ruthless about it. Every unused chart is maintenance cost and visual noise charged against the charts that do get used.
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Write the definitions down.
A one-page data dictionary next to the dashboard -- what each metric means, what it excludes, who owns it. It ends more arguments than any visualisation you will ever build.