Whither Dashboard Design?
surfingcomplexity.blog
surfingcomplexity.blog
Staleness, which Majors alludes to, is one problem.
The visuals being a poor aid to interpretability is another.
Usually these problems are coexisting & compounding: there’s too many charts here, half of them are out of date, half I don’t know how to make sense of them, and I’m not sure which half is which.
It would be interesting to revisit some of these problems in the AI era, because often the missing layer is a guide & runbook (which maybe an agent could do) that’s better than “page everyone who might know why this chart looks bad”
Reminds me of another fun dashboard question which is like “how many different ‘single source of truth’s does your company have and how many are true?”
My current dashboard includes metrics like free -> paid user conversion, app crashes, features that are most used, etc.
Those are fundamental aspects of my business that I need to track every day and map to events in time like new releases, marketing efforts, etc.
How are they "an invitation to pattern-match the past instead of interrogate the present" or "answers to some long-forgotten question"?
The problem is that dashboards are static snapshots of a dynamic reality. They are built on past understanding, and as systems evolve, they can become outdated and misleading. This can happen in several ways, two common ones are:
- Data drift: The underlying meaning of the data changes. For example, a bug might cause app crashes to be misreported, rendering crash-related metrics unreliable.
- Blind spots: Dashboards can't capture what they're not designed to measure. If user needs shift, a dashboard focused on existing feature usage won't reveal those changes.
This limitation isn't unique to dashboards. Any projection from a higher-dimensional space (reality) to a lower-dimensional representation (dashboard) will inevitably lose information. The problem is exacerbated when the representation doesn't adapt to the changing reality.
Procedurally generating pages from data and linking them together is a core part of the offering. In many applications this is far easier for users than presenting them with a conventional filter interface.
Are you guys looking for people? Haha