Does your dashboard actually help someone make decisions?

Does your dashboard actually help someone make decisions or does it just make data look pretty?

Meriem Benhabiles wrote an interesting piece for Smashing Magazine rethinking data visualisation around the questions users need answered.

It’s easy to start with the metrics a product already tracks and work out how to display them. But just because you have the metrics, it doesn’t necessarily mean someone needs them. And if you end up bloating the dashboard with unimportant data, it will only make finding and using the crucial bits more tedious.

Example: for a SaaS dashboard, work back from the actual use case: what does this person need to check or decide when they log in?

A team manager might need to see where someone needs support. An individual might want to know what to tackle next. Those needs could lead to quite different views of the same data.

That’s a useful question to bring into a design review: can someone look at this screen and immediately work out their next step? What happens when two users need to follow disparate journeys?

Worth a read if you’re working on a data-heavy product: Rethinking Data Visualisation