
The laws of shitty dashboards - paulcothenet
http://attackwithnumbers.com/the-laws-of-shitty-dashboard
======
aunty_helen
>They also employ UX techniques that dates from a time where the only UI
component you can use was a light bulb. If that red thing is critical, can’t
you tell me right away what it means?

This annoyed me a little bit. A check engine light is the perfect component
for what it does. If it's on it means that something may be seriously wrong
and that you're probably too stupid or ill-equipped to fix it.

If it was something simple, easily detectable and fixable it would have its
own light, ie the door is open, you're running out of gas.

~~~
jschwartzi
It's also a great design because it needs to be highly reliable, and lights
are probably the simplest things you can apply power to to generate a
notification.

Also the note about the tachometer struck me as a little odd. The tachometer
can tell you if your vehicle is running at a high idle, if the bumps you're
feeling are misfires or the road, and it can also tell you whether you've
accidentally left your vehicle in 3rd instead of drive after coasting to a
stop. Finally, the tach can be used as a raw assessment of the load you're
putting on an engine and you can optimize your driving habits according to
that. It's not useless information and I much prefer it to an extra cluster of
dummy lamps for all that stuff.

~~~
userbinator
_Finally, the tach can be used as a raw assessment of the load you 're putting
on an engine and you can optimize your driving habits according to that._

Perfect example of this are the people who drive with an automatic and somehow
manage to stay just below a shift point much of the time, meaning that the
engine is at a higher RPM than it needs to be and could be consuming more fuel
and wearing faster as a result.

~~~
XorNot
...this doesn't really tally, especially in modern automatics with electronic
gearboxes. Most engines are optimally efficient at some key number of revs,
and the gearbox strives to keep the car in that range.

~~~
myhf
Yes, but your web app is probably not as mature as a modern automatic
transmission.

------
mehh
Most articles are shitty, this is an example of one.

Most technical articles are written by someone blinkered by their specific
experience which they feel is so wonderful that they should share with the
world.

Save the internet from such dross and write it on a piece of paper, roll it up
and shove it up the ares your talking out of.

~~~
nsmartt
Writing bad articles is a great way to move toward writing good articles.

Writing in the public view is a great way to get feedback on your writing and
the subjects you discuss—e.g. corrections, further education, etc. For some
people, it also increase the pressure to improve.

Vanity is only _one_ possible reason for writing in the public view, and it's
an exercise with large potential gains. Your perspective is entirely off, and
you've decided to take an opportunity to attack someone who was either brave
enough or indifferent enough to risk being attacked in the first place.

~~~
mehh
Well perhaps slagging off the work done by others in a domain he is not an
expert in isn't a sensible approach to writing articles.

~~~
nsmartt
People don't need to be experts to recognize flaws in tools aimed at
consumers.

~~~
Gigablah
Sure, you don't need to be an expert to have an opinion.

However I didn't come to Hacker News to read a stream of consciousness
consisting of the word "shitty" and random screenshots.

~~~
nsmartt
That's a good reason to downvote or stop reading, but I question whether
attacking the author for having the audacity to publish the post is a good
move.

------
userbinator
There seems to be an attitude throughout the article of "users are too stupid
to understand dashboards", and maybe this is true to some extent, but that's
really not a good reason to dumb-down interfaces (which seems to be what it's
calling for.) E.g.

 _You have no idea what your users will decide based on the data you are
showing them. But you somehow assume your users will know._

 _My eternal gratitude to anyone who can tell me what to do with session
duration at the hourly level. “People at 4:53AM on Monday stayed longer on the
site than at 11:36AM”? So what?_

Just because you don't know what to do with the data doesn't mean the same
applies to everyone else...

~~~
CCs
My understanding is, that the attitude was "throwing numbers together and
calling it a dashboard is bad, ask the users what they actually want".

~~~
endersshadow
I'd go quite a bit further. Most users have no idea what they actually want. I
think the key to building a dashboard is to ask three questions:

1\. How do you measure success? -- or -- How will you know that life is good?
How do you know that the sky is falling? 2\. If you see this number (something
specified in #1) go above or below a certain value, what are you going to do?
Anything? 3\. When and where do you need to have the info from #'s 1 and 2 to
actually take action? i.e.-Do you need to be inside the warehouse? On your
phone? At your desk? Daily? Monthly? By the minute? Push?!

1 tells you _what_ to put on the dashboard, 2 tells you how to prioritize the
information (something that's important but not actionable will be something
that can be found, but isn't prominent or on display above-the-fold), and 3
tells you the form factor/latency that's needed.

I've built a lot of dashboards over the years. Some have completely changed
businesses. Some have languished in obscurity. Most are used fairly regularly
(at least monthly), but don't actually add much value beyond time savings of
having the numbers automated. The ones that really changed businesses and
provided some benefit beyond just time savings have had clear answers to those
three questions.

~~~
VLM
I would add a 4th also based on extensive experience, can the users do
anything at all about the situation? Being able to order someone to generate
numbers doesn't mean the recipients are permitted or capable of doing anything
at all. It shows they "care" but a random number generator is more effective
WRT dev time than trying to generate meaningful numbers.

I've seen dashboards get tied up in internal politics. The list of recipients
of "quality" dashboard is a line in the sand vs the "quantity" dashboard
political group. The recipient list and who controls it is far more important
than the data contained in the report. Whats important is who reports to who,
and why.

A fifth question is does anyone in the chain of command even remotely
understand basic statistics like error bars and standard deviations? If the
only purpose of the report is to loudly trumpet when pet division B beats
divisions A and C thru G, then a very high std deviation / error rate makes
stack ranking give the predetermined "correct" result more often. I've seen
this personally in "metrics as a teambuilding exercise" where whats actually
produced is a weekly report that every division will get to stack ranking win
at least once a quarter to meet the Morale Improvement goal on some exec's
goal list. Again a PRNG gives better data than real data, if the goal is to
give everyone a participation trophy.

------
hvass
I recommend two resources on creating dashboards, both from very experienced
practitioners:

1) [http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-dashboards-
strategic-...](http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-dashboards-strategic-
tactical-best-practices-tips-examples/)

2) Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few -
[http://www.amazon.ca/Information-Dashboard-Design-
Effective-...](http://www.amazon.ca/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-
Communication/dp/0596100167)

~~~
travem
I can second the recommendation for the Information Dashboard Design book. It
provides some extremely clear guidance and recommendations. Thanks for the
pointer to the first resource, I'll definitely check that out.

------
chavesn
Am I the only one that doesn't get the joke about what's wrong with "Last 14
days" and "Last 12 months"?

~~~
swat535
the option right below it mentions "This year.."

~~~
Romdeau
This year should only mean this calendar year, last 12 months is a full 12
month overview. Both are useful for various reasons.

That said i've seen "this year" used to mean last 12 months as well...

------
dredmorbius
Not all dashboards are shitty or useless.

New Relic comes to mind, and it's a tool I've found hugely useful.

While it doesn't instrument full system monitoring (though it's getting
there), it provides numerous system and site metrics, monitoring, and a useful
degree of logging, that's hugely useful.

One of the biggest gains for us came when it implemented JVM heap monitoring.
This is possible through jconsole, but jconsole is a steaming heap which if it
were actually made of sh _t would be useful as it might provide fertilizer. It
's a Java app itself, has no persistence, must be running to tell you what you
need to know, presents its own security vulnerabilities (if you can attach
jconsole to your JVMs other JDK hacks can as well), and more. Given the
critical nature of heap and GC operations to site performance, having the
insight through NR, and not having to rely on desktop jconsole sessions (for
each member of the admin team individually, oh yeah, forgot that one) was a
huge boost.

And the NR team both understands the tech they're monitoring and works with
clients. So many of the stats provided _are* actionable.

~~~
vkjv
Interesting, because we use New Relic extensively, and I was just thinking of
it as the prime example of, "what the hell is the purpose of all these
dashboards and what do they mean?"

~~~
Washuu
Yep! As much as I love New Relic's logging I find that its interface is
clunky, things never go to the places I believe they will take me, and there
is an extensive amount of information clutter.

~~~
dredmorbius
It _is_ a one-size-fits-all interface. And I've definitely created my own
tools to augment it. But as a first cut, I've found it a hugely useful tool.

------
gear54rus
Srsly, this article seems littered with so many assumptions it's hard to
decipher the actual point.

 _Tachometer has no use?_ Tell that to professional drivers.

 _Real time stats are worthless?_ Not unless you expect a spike in your server
load (?) and need to react to it immediately.

If you can't find a use for some number, others may. That's what controls are
for. You take the set of data your app (or whatever) has to offer, then you
toss in some controls (your job is to make them intuitive so user does
actually use them without tears) that can operate on and present the data and
then everyone gets to choose what they see.

Bottom line is that the only way you can figure out that something is right
for each individual is to give them a choice. The whole _no one needs X_ seems
far-fetched (to say the least). Sure you need to talk to users, but they most
likely will express _different_ opinions.

Also, _don 't build more dashboards_. What? So we shouldn't improve on our
mistakes, right? The concept is so _bad_ that we shouldn't even try because
_no one_ (again, assumptions) can build good dashboard. C'mon..

------
skybrian
I was hoping for an article that would explain how to design a good dashboard.
This isn't it.

~~~
vitovito
Stephen Few's book, Information Dashboard Design, is about the design industry
bible on the subject. (His other books are supposedly good, too.)

As many of the other comments in here have noted, the design of a good
dashboard is often "don't design one, you need something else."

------
error54
>"Corollary: No one needs real-time"

If you've ever run service where you're anticipating a large traffic spike and
you need to monitor server stats, real-time statistics are invaluable.

~~~
saosebastiao
If you know exactly what you are waiting for and you know exactly what you
will do when it happens, then you should probably automate and optimize that
process instead of spending your time building some fancy graphics. And if you
don't know what you are waiting for nor what you will do about it, you don't
need real time metrics.

~~~
error54
What if it's an event that happens infrequently, say 2 times year? In such
cases, it wouldn't be worthwhile to spend the time automating when it's
easier/cheaper to take manual action.

~~~
dkarapetyan
No, automation is always the answer. When you are forced to formalize
processes with code you invariably find all sorts of hidden assumptions. This
has happened to me every single time I've tried to automate legacy manual
processes. There are always hidden assumptions that are unearthed. Unearthing
hidden assumptions is always worth the effort.

~~~
coldtea
A hidden assumption behind what you wrote is that all automation is like the
scripts you've written to automate your processes.

There are things which automating them would take lots of man-months and tens
of thousands of dollars, so much that the effort is not worth it from the
savings -- or from any "hidden assumptions" you discover.

~~~
jbergens
You should also consider how much it costs you to miss a part of a process
that is manually carried out but that could be automated. If it really
expensive to miss something then automation might be a good idea even for
simple tasks.

------
jwillgoesfast
>"Most KPIs (traffic, revenue) are too volatile on a daily basis to be useful.
Yet “last 30 days daily” is more or less the default option."

YES! If you're building a dashboard, don't answer the question "what data do I
have?" or "what does the brass say this should be?" But instead, get out and
talk to users, find out what data is most important to them, think outside the
box, throw some different ideas out there and see what sticks with users.

~~~
thijsb
I can only agree. Especially real-time data. There are only a few cases where
real-time might be usefull

~~~
mehh
If you have a site delivering real time content, such as news, its pretty
important.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Not really. Humans are more or less incapable of filtering noise and avoiding
making premature choices in realtime. "OMFG, this story blipped upward in a
statistically insignificant way. Hype it!" Myself and a colleage ran this
experiment several times at a large news organization. Realtime is useful for
algorithms, useless for humans.

Of course if you are marketing an analytics product, give the customer a
realtime dashboard. It's useless but it makes them feel powerful and in
control. The news writers would certainly have thrown a fit if we tried to
take away their useless chartbeat.

------
rdtsc
> Or because the exec team somehow thinks “we need a dashboard”.

I think many have recognized the demand for dashboards and sprung a cottage
industry around it. That is demands often are perverted and sometimes it just
comes from an exec wanting to see some "action" or gaining "visibility". They
have VC money to spend and will spend money for moving "realtime" colors on
the screen.

For the dashboard creators, that is all they need. If someone buys is it. They
will keep making it.

On other hand, to disagree with the author. "So what?" People want shitty
realtime moving colors because they look cool. Heck, have you seen the crap
people pay for in app stores, farmville type games on Facebook and so on. One
can criticize the providers and consumer of that crap. Yet they are happily
transferring money and product between each other.

~~~
dunmalg
>People want shitty realtime moving colors because they look cool.

Sometimes we just want a moving graph that looks important, so the boss knows
we're working on something.

------
capkutay
From a product perspective, dashboards are pretty much expected and required.
If you're building something in the 21st century, people expect a central
thing that tells people what's going on. If your answer is 'hey dashboards are
shitty', customers can use your competitors shitty dashboards and at least
feel like they have more insight into whats going on in your product.

~~~
error54
Or better yet since dashboards are so terrible, let's all go download 10
million line CSV files. While I've seen my fair share of terrible/useless
dashboards, many do provide some sort of insight into the data that previously
would have only been gained by aggregating log files or running complex sql
queries.

------
michaelbuckbee
Dashboards are a visualization and interactive tool and like any tool have
better and worse uses.

While the OP hits lots of points squarely, I strongly disagree about the "no
one needs real time". In particular, any service that does onboarding or
signups would be really well served to track new users through the getting
started process.

I live in the custom dashboard that I built for my startup.

Screenshot:
[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s16/sh/c8cdeadc-643d-4028-b58...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s16/sh/c8cdeadc-643d-4028-b586-6d8f36b0bf16/49ce67dce8d264dd336469060a9af924)

It tracks every single signup from provisioning through to successful setup.
It lets me easily see if people are flailing trying to get things working and
if it looks like they are I send them a personal email like: "It looks like
you might be having some issues with picking an email approver address, can I
help?"

Having this real-time insight into customer issues lets me provide much better
support and from an ROI basis is incredibly worthwhile.

The actual service:
[https://addons.herokuapp.com/expeditedssl](https://addons.herokuapp.com/expeditedssl)

------
grimtrigger
> Yes, back-end applications need ways to show their users that they’re
> working

This is probably the only reason many dashboards exist. They're not there to
be useful, but to provide proof that the gears are turning behind the system.

------
reitanqild
> My eternal gratitude to anyone who can tell me what to do with session
> duration at the hourly level. “People at 4:53AM on Monday stayed longer on
> the site than at 11:36AM”? So what?

This is so arrogant. If your customers are not interested in target
demographics then ok. Generalising this to everyone is not ok.

------
com2kid
I agree 99% of the time.

That said, I have an amazing PM who has customized the living heck out of our
TFS Dashboard such that it is useful.

Most fun of all is seeing our "daily bug resolved as fix rate" and "daily bug
incoming rate". Seeing them as flat numbers in boxes is, IMHO, more useful
than seeing them as on a graph.

But yeah, the dashboards I see other teams using? The worst is a bug tracking
dash that is updated once every 4 hours. During crunch week, it serves to do
not but spread chaos and confusion.

------
wyc
"Take care dashboards for example. They use vast amount of real estate to
display information that is useless 99% of the time. How often do you need to
know the RPM on an automatic car? Can’t you just take that stupid dial out and
put something useful instead?."

Assuming the author meant car, this would be very dangerous (i.e. irreversible
engine damage):
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redline](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redline)

~~~
paulcothenet
Typo corrected. I'm not saying you should let the users go in the red without
knowing. But does it have to be a big dial that takes a 1/3 of the dashboard?

~~~
jschwartzi
What engine-critical information would you replace the extra real-estate with?

~~~
jackmoore
Nothing is always an option. Including anything that is unhelpful dilutes
focus on the things that are.

------
VLM
Nobody mentioned astrology or dilution of responsibility?

Dashboards are an astrological tool. Here is an elaborate and complicated
process you don't understand to generate numbers that are devoid of meaning,
to dilute responsibility when you make a decision that turns out to be wrong.

The article misses this point entirely. A good dashboard from the end user
perspective can be used as numerical backup for any arbitrary decision at any
time. The author just doesn't get it. Thats why the author is confused by the
"just keep adding stuff until I can always use it to justify whatever I want
to do".

This is how dashboards are used in practice, this is their actual reason for
existing. This is why money is spent on them.

The article is like a debunking of astrology, "well see here, based on the
gravitational constant and the distance to this orange vs venus, the square
results in ..." and the boss replys with "shut up I don't care about reasons I
decided to go to war with eastasia and we've always been at war with eastasia
and my astrologer always had my back, and apparently you don't, so lets
discuss the effect of all this gravitational formula stuff on your career
prospects vs backing me up which you're paid as a yes man to do..."

------
TheAwesomeA
So, has anyone a constructive article/site/book for good dashboard design?
e.g., how you should deal with the mix of daily and monthly data?

~~~
sejje
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316264)

------
siganakis
I've found that replacing a fancy dashboard of key stats with a simple daily
email with 5-10 key numbers is far more valuable.

The dirty little secret of the business intelligence / dashboard industry is
that no one logs into them.

A daily email helps with this problem, as people tend to read emails, even if
its only a glance.

~~~
akurilin
I've gotten a lot of mileage from Mint's dashboards when trying to identify
where I'm wasting money. I appreciate their email, but the dashboard is
actually tremendously useful.

------
e0m
What are people's favorite examples of good dashboards?

------
coldcode
I rail at Google Analytics dashboards all the time. You'd think I would be
interested in today's or this week's or this month's numbers, yet there are no
options for this in the calendar widget. People who write these things not
talking with people who use these things in a meaningful way is a classic type
of fail.

------
ejain
My main gripe is with "static" dashboards, i.e. dashboards that don't let you
drill down (e.g. to investigate an interesting spike), and has disconnected
widgets (i.e. applying a filter to one widget doesn't affect the other
widgets).

------
jasonwen
I completely agree. Most information is nice to know but not actionable at
all. It's the reason why we don't have any dashboards. Just periodic updates
(weekly and monthly) in static PDFs.

Nothing real time, no dashboards, static data, but customers love it.

------
pbreit
I suspect the author is probably right but didn't glean much actionable from
the post.

~~~
coldtea
Perhaps you didn't read it enough?

1) Don't just throw all the numbers you have a page. 2) Talk to the users to
find what they need measuring 3) Don't multiply controls and options, show
fewer specific things 4) Consider what displays will lead to specific
actionable insight 4) Don't use specific ranges just so data will change 5)
Real time data are mostly gimmicky, don't add it unless it serves a specific
purpose 6) Consider if you even need a dashboard in the first place ...

~~~
Gigablah
I like your summary much better. I tried reading the article and all I saw was
"shitty", "shitty" and "shitty". The author needs to learn how to present
information, ironically.

------
mwetzler
Data Scientist here. Can confirm, most dashboards are shitty. Usually you
don't need a dashboard, you need a human who knows how to analyze data to get
useful information out of it. A dashboard is not an end goal, an informed
decision is.

------
dmourati
Read Lean Analytics:
[http://leananalyticsbook.com/](http://leananalyticsbook.com/)

It mentions the OMTM, One Metric That Matters. When you focus your effort to
one number, things get much better.

------
teachingaway
Dashboard in 1950's GMC trucks is solid. Just two dials. One for speed, the
other displays 4 types of engine data.

[http://i.imgur.com/g9RUbiF.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/g9RUbiF.jpg)

------
bradbeattie
Important take-away I've found from building monitoring software: find a way
to determine what data your users don't care about and de-emphasise or all-out
hide it.

------
philmcnamara
Any examples of great dashboards that people love?

------
ajuc
Jira dashboard is actually useful. At least when you choose the right widgets.

------
hongkongsmog
Tableau is an awesome data aggregate and dashboard program.

~~~
Sami_Lehtinen
This is something I can really agree about, even if in this context it sounds
more like an ad. But I prefer Tableau over some premade dashboard, because
Tableau is really incredibly flexible. As far as I know, I haven't seen any
dashboard even distantly closing on Tableaus featuers. I just loved using it.
Of course there are many tools which can be used to deliver same kind of end
results. But the process of creating using Tableau is just wonderful.

The final key with Tableau is the possibility of endlessly refining the data.
So you can star with basic dashboard view, but you can narrow it down to the
things that really do matter. It's not a dashboard, it's a data discovery tool
when used by experienced analyst and great fun for not so experienced guys
too. If we compare it to other popular similar tools like QlikView.

Btw. Many of QlivView dashboards are just those top results of Google
Dashboard search.

