A dashboard that expects you to know where to look
A dashboard loses to simply asking a colleague. That has nothing to do with server speed.
Published . Written by Bunga
Good dashboards often go unused, and the reason is rarely technical.
Across several dashboard projects, the pattern repeats. The dashboard ships, it is praised at the demo, then it is quietly abandoned. People go back to messaging the colleague who is assumed to know.
We thought it was a matter of habit. It turned out to be simpler than that: asking a person is faster.
Asking takes one sentence. Opening the dashboard takes remembering the address, logging in, picking the right period, picking the right branch or unit, then reading the right number among other numbers. Five steps against one.
The fix was not more features. We removed instead: the most frequently asked question has to be answered on the first screen, with no filter and no click. Filters stay, but for rare questions, not daily ones.
Finding those questions is not sophisticated work. We collected the questions that kept getting repeated, then made sure each one was answered without anyone having to search.
The measure of success is equally plain, and it lives outside the dashboard: fewer messages asking about something already on screen.