Why do so many data dashboards fail?

In this vlog I talk about what I think is the biggest reason why many data dashboards fail.

Transcript

?Thank you. So last week I asked the people who follow my newsletter. If they have any topic requests. And I had this nice little email I got from Dr. Maria-Theresa Okafor, she says happy Wednesday and thanks for the opportunity to weigh in on your vlog topics. I would love to see a vlog on dashboard creation and dashboard tips.

Now I thought that was a great idea. Although I think it might take me more than just one vlog, but that’s okay. I think today, really what I want to go into is the first thing. Why do so many data dashboards fail? Like, why are they bad? I have a cartoon on this, actually, one of my favorite cartoons.

And in it. It looks like this, isn’t the actual cartoon is not much better drawn, but it, does have a full cartoon. The one person, there are two people there sitting in a car. Here’s the dashboard over here. And the one person says, why is this spedometer stuck on 35?

And the other one says the car only collects speed data once a year. And. That’s the issue. Is that when people create data dashboards, a lot of the time they create imagination dashboards. Things that are purely fictional, they have all these great ideas for everything that’s going to be in the dashboard.

And then they get to the dashboard and they’re disappointed in what they see. It’s not necessarily because they might blame the dashboard tool or the design. They might blame themselves for designing a bad dashboard. But it actually has nothing to do with the dashboard or the tool. It has to do with this.

See. To understand a dashboard. We have to understand what it is that a dashboard is supposed to do. And a good dashboard is a connection point between lots of data and a person. At least from a research and evaluation sense. There is a little bit of, okay. What knowledge do you, what information do you have to know on an ongoing basis to make decisions? So if you think about a car, knowing your speed at a given point in time tells you if you need to slow down or speed up at the speed changes, you can.

You can act accordingly. You don’t just have to guess at your speed. But a lot of times when we’re creating dashboards for research and evaluation, It starts with this idea that there’s a lot of data out there. That we have access to. And we have people in our organizations. We have stakeholders, audience members managers, all sorts of people who need access to this data.

But we can’t just give it to them it in the raw form. We have to create something in between. An interface for this data. And that’s what a dashboard really is. It’s essentially a user interface for datasets and data tables. And if you think about that it makes sense. Why. This dashboard, of course doesn’t work.

Because this dashboard. Doesn’t have lots of data. And the challenge is this is what we see when we see most dashboards we just see the person and the dashboard. We often don’t see the data behind the dashboard. So the data doesn’t exist. We see the same thing. Whether we have tons of data or we have no data.

And ultimately when we have no data, it doesn’t make sense to make a dashboard at all. And that happened so often. Research and evaluation where a team will make a dashboard where a dashboard just does not make sense. I would say that the vast majority of the time a website is going to be better than a data dashboard.

And this goes for anything that has a lot of qualitative information, anything. That is infrequently updated. So let’s say quarterly yearly, these kinds of things don’t need data dashboards. They just need reports that are all updated often. Even some basic interactive data, if the data that you’re sharing is variable, that you’re offering different metrics at different times.

That’s also a place where you’re probably better off with a website and then the data dashboard. And then multiple audiences. That’s another place where people create these convoluted dashboards because they’re trying to create for too many audiences. So hope that helps. That’s the idea of why do many dashboards fail?

Next time around. I think one thing we’re going to talk about. Next is we’ll talk about building a good user interface for a data user interface, so good dashboard. And we can talk about tips like that in the future. We can also talk about. Building reporting websites or report blogs. Because I think they’re under utilized and we could do a lot more of them.

So thanks for watching. Let me know if you have any topic requests you can let me know in the comments or you can head to freshspectrum.com. Join my newsletter, where I send it out each week, ask people for requests. You can always send me one there. Otherwise. Check out my website and.

Subscribe to this channel and we’ll talk soon. All right. See you later. Bye.