Dashboards are where analytics projects meet Monday mornings. They’re the monitors, reassurance and warning lights that you use to quickly understand what’s happening and to set responses in motion, whether those are immediate remedies or starting analytical projects to find out more information.
Getting dashboards right…
At Sequence, we believe that to be useful a dashboard should display numbers to which you already understand how to respond. Festooning a screen with more metrics is easy but a useful dashboard is grounded in the responses that you will take. It’s the speedometer in your car and your ‘check engine’ light. The simple summary that alerts you when you need to take action.
Dashboards go wrong when we try to use them as analytics engines. Dashboards do the what, not the why, they alert you quickly to the fact that something doesn’t look right so that you can brief analysts to investigate why. A dashboard that tries to do complex analysis will quickly become bloated and so frustrating to use that it doesn’t get used at all.