5 Clues You’re Succumbing to Death by Dashboard
Dashboards are out for 2020. Augmented and customized data stories are in.
At least, that is according to Gartner’s #2 Data and Analytics Technology Trend for 2020. If you’re wondering:
Augmented analytics is the use of enabling technologies such as machine learning and AI to assist with data preparation, insight generation and insight explanation to augment how people explore and analyze data in analytics and BI platforms.
For you and I, this means tools or widgets that can automate the creation of insights and tell the story to your user, rather than forcing the user to find it somewhere buried among a suite of disparate dashboards and a boggling number of data filters.
Too many tools, complexities, and the sheer number of dashboards available to end users are contributing to the dreaded Death by Dashboard. A graveyard of well-intentioned dashboards sit unused as users — frustrated and overwhelmed by the sheer number of dashboards and their perceived complexity—continue to requests data extracts directly from the analysts.
Here are 5 clues that you (or your users) are at risk of succumbing to Death by Dashboard:
1. There is a dashboard for everything (and I mean everything)
2. Your organization’s dashboards all have different looks/feels/designs/flows (rather than a consistent UI/UX)
3. Your dashboards’ click-through stats dwindle quickly after its initial launch or training
4. Your end users still ask you to pull data that is already contained within a dashboard (or two, or three) and that they theoretically could have extracted directly
5. Your end users cannot quickly find the dashboard they are looking for, that they were shown once, during that one meeting a few months ago
If you’re in this boat, don’t fret — I’m right there next to you. Dashboards have been the rage of the late 2010’s and spread like wildfire across just about every industry. As tools like Tableau and Power BI allowed any citizen business user or analyst to quickly start building them, we had fun dragging and dropping fields onto the canvas and seeing the lines and bar charts appear. Albeit, they are still in one of the cringe-worthy default color schemes, but hey, we can customize that at some point when we have time! We loved the fact that we could add many, many filters for users to “self-service” and filter to answer their own questions — even if we had to squeeze all of those filters into weird places and take up 110% of real estate typically available on a monitor screen.
We have certainly mastered the mechanics of how to quickly build dashboards for a multitude of use cases, but for these cheeky reasons and a host of others, they’re still falling short.
In 2021, an evolution is occurring as we now turn our attention to the art of creating dashboards that are usable, informative, pleasing, simple, well-planned, and appropriate. And shortly thereafter, we’ll need to focus on the science of new and automated tools that can identify and push relevant insights to our users beyond what dashboards can currently do. This is where Gartner’s #2 trend comes in.
Over future posts, we will explore ways to build towards the solution, even if — like me — you may have actually built some of the problems. Stay tuned!
Also, you can read all 10 of Gartner’s 2020 Trends here:
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-06-22-gartner-identifies-top-10-data-and-analytics-technolo
