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Dashboards are a powerful tool that you probably shouldn’t try to make

Kai Wong
UX Collective
Published in
6 min readMay 1, 2021

My worst data visualization work has all been dashboards, and I recently realized why.

Part of learning Data Viz is experimenting with different types of visualizations to present information, and dashboards are something I’ve been looking into as I’ve started working with more complex datasets.

It’s a standard visual format that a lot of people have come to expect, but there are several catastrophic mistakes you can fall into when creating one.

To elaborate on this, one needs to look no further than Jared Spool.

A grey photo of a graveyard, with several graves in the front, a fence, and then a hill with the sun shining behind it.
Photo by Einar Storsul on Unsplash

Dashboards can easily become a data graveyard

“Dashboards are where data goes to die.” — Michael Solomon, Product Strategy Director

Jared spool’s tweet: Dashboards are often what customers ask for. They are rarely what customers need. If you’re building a dashboard, it’s likely your user research wasn’t finished.

Jared Spool, the founder of User Interface Engineering, tweeted out something last year that sparked a fair amount of discussion about dashboards.

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Written by Kai Wong

7xTop writer in UX Design. UX, Data Viz, and Data. Author of Data-Informed UX Design: https://tinyurl.com/2p83hkav. Substack: https://dataanddesign.substack.com

Responses (6)

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The problem is, that most dashboards do no "thinking". They just show data.
We figured out, that as long as you do not interpret data, you should not show it. If you visualize data, where the user needs to deal with its interpretation - it won't work.

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I agree with all the points you mentioned. Also, one thing that most of us don’t take into account is that dashboards are just a tool and not the silver bullet solution.
If you or your customer/audience don’t have the urge of exploring the data by…

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The problem with most dashboards is they attempt to “think” for a user, which is impossible given what a dashboard is designed to do. On balance, users need different types of information at different times created in views that best reflect their…

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