When Dashboards Fail Their Purpose

What reviewing dozens of dashboards taught me about clarity, value, and user needs

Lately I’ve been reviewing a lot of different dashboards, and the conversations often go something like this:

• What is the dashboard about, why was it created?

• It’s about team efficiency.

• How is efficiency measured?

• By the number of completed tasks and the speed of their completion.

• Why do people look at this?

• To understand who on the team is performing better or worse.

• Which chart shows that?
  [they scroll down the page and find a table with this data, or start applying a bunch of filters to get one of the charts to display what they need]

If the dashboard’s main purpose can’t be achieved just by looking at it, there’s a good chance something’s wrong with it. Either we don’t understand the goal, or we’ve designed it in a way that’s just not user-friendly.

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The second type of question:

• What can we say based on this chart?

• That we have this particular price for the product.

• Okay, we most likely already know what our product costs — what can we add in terms of value?

• There are benchmarks and price dynamics in a table below.

• Let’s move that to the top and immediately show where our price stands relative to the benchmark and what its trend is.

Every chart on a dashboard should deliver some value and answer a specific user question. Sometimes you look at something and it’s genuinely beautiful — you just enjoy it visually — but it doesn’t actually solve any problem for the users. It’s just a pretty picture about something they already knew. And then you painfully have to cut it...

P.S. I’ve simplified the examples a lot for illustration purposes, but I think the point comes across.