Workshop 2 – Fixing dashboard design

There are many dashboards in the world and many (if not most) are poorly designed. Why? Because they are made from the same playbook: determine what data is available and how to visualize that data (often using gratuitous automotive-inspired gauges), and, because they aren’t usable by default, make everything configurable. After all, if users don’t like it, they can just configure it, right?

A better approach: Design dashboards for the people who are actually using them, and deliver value by default.

In this workshop, we will start by reviewing the problems with traditional dashboard design and identify design principles and process along the way. Working in teams, we will then apply that process to design a new dashboard step-by-step, and evaluate it against our principles. Finally, we will explore why so many poorly designed dashboards exist (hint: execs love them because they demo well) and what to do about it.