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YMMV, has any technologist found a dashboard useful? I've had a very bad history with dashboards. All I've seen get ordered up by nontechnical leadership, not

by urthor 4y ago

YMMV, has any technologist found a dashboard useful? I've had a very bad history with dashboards. All I've seen get ordered up by nontechnical leadership, not looked at, and involved endless fiddling with painful corporate applications. The non-technical stakeholders I've had a good relationship with, I vend a SQL script/Jupyter Notebook and educate. They're happy to up-skill. I've only had dashboards requested by users with a dysfunctional relationship with engineering, in companies where the data is irrelevant. In environments where data matters, fast moving consumer goods, web, etc, stakeholders speak SQL/Jupyter. I've seen remarkably non-technological people learn SQL and query read replicas because they need sales aggregates. In environments where data doesn't matter, dashboards are requested as a corporate power play. A director who doesn't care about your project asks for a dashboard to assert their authority, and remind you your budget can be cancelled.

pid-1 4y ago
Yes I've seen many good uses of dashboards. That said, I totally get where are you coming from, been there as well.
cirgue 4y ago
Dashboards are really useful when you’re trying to distribute a set of metrics that large numbers of people actually need to know and agree on in order to do their jobs. Most metrics aren’t like this, so there are a lot of bad dashboards, but they definitely have their place. Edit: A good example of this is something like incoming shipments for a warehouse. Management all the way down to warehouse workers need to know what is slated for delivery, what’s already been delivered in the last few days, and what’s late.
javier_e06 4y ago
Look at my latest gizmo...on a drone! Look at my latest data crunch app...on the web! Yep, smells like management all over.
quinoablast 4y ago
You’re definitely right that metrics are often used as post-hoc justification of decisions already made. An example of actual dashboard culture is AWS’s operational metrics meetings. The construction of the dashboards themselves is scrutinized just as much as any latency or availability metric (may God have mercy on your soul if use a pie chart or display the median of metrics without justification). And it’s actually useful for surfacing issues and knowledge sharing. The frequent cadence can be a big cause if stress though. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/the-wheel/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/the-wheel/
nkrisc 4y ago
From the non-technical side: it isn’t necessarily that dashboards are not useful, it’s just that most people who want them don’t actually know what data is useful.
slowhand09 4y ago
Tons of good experience with dashboards. Managing Oracle databases? Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. Managing your investments? Schwab has a good interface.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jwithington 4y ago
I've certainly had your skepticism and these same challenges. Nonetheless, one study of Shopify storeowners who adopted dashboards saw a 4-10% increase in weekly revenue post adoption: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2022.1352 https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2022.135... But to your point there's often a principal agent problem in larger organizations. A decision-maker wants to appear "data-driven" so asks for a dashboard because it costs nothing for them to ask--someone else does the work. And when the dashboard shows something different than expected they dismiss the concern or find a reason that the dashboard is "wrong."
pplonski86 4y ago
You are lucky! There are many people that don't want to touch any code. Setting up a Python environment locally might be a big pain. That's a huge blocker for notebooks sharing. I treat dashboard as visualization part. What is more, visualized data is used to trigger further actions - for example, send alert email. Yes, I found them useful.
- kulikalov 4y ago
  You can share notebooks using hosted solutions
  - pplonski86 4y ago
    Yes, that's the solution but only if you share with people that understand Python and if you are allowed to upload code + data to the cloud.
- syntaxfree 4y ago
  Docker?
Mehdi2277 4y ago
I quite like monitoring dashboards and use them frequently. Mainly for examining system health and debugging operational issues. My previous team had some business metric charts/dashboards related to system we worked on that we reviewed weekly. Most weeks review was it looks normal and was pretty fast review. Occasionally we'd see an unexpected deviation in some top level metric and that could trigger follow up work. Ideally all interesting deviations an alert would catch, but alerts are never complete. Most of dashboards I've cared for my team/department was primary user of. I have not made dashboards much for other stakeholders.
keithalewis 4y ago
“I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter." Sadly, your common sense observations will get belittled by the growing crowd of Liliputians who seem to enjoy celebrating their ignorance.
- urthor 4y ago
  I don't mean this as a criticism of the link author. Nobody wants to use a toilet plunger. You still want a good one. Merely an observation about the dashboard industry.
kulikalov 4y ago
Non-techies wielding SQL is a big advantage for sure, but a moderately complex dataset sends SQL aggregations complexity through the roof. While modern data warehouses can handle such queries, I can hardly imagine non-technical person being able to write it. That's where dashboards come in handy.
- urthor 4y ago
  Denormalized views? Every dashboard is an exercise in denormalization anyway. Certainly I would never expect people to be experts. SQL Group By is nontrivial.
  - kulikalov 4y ago
    Still limited to 2-dimensional data. Data warehouses support structs and arrays, but it's not easy for a human to read.
apwheele 4y ago
Ditto, although for my applications they are not live (typical business processes lag by a month or more). So most of my stakeholders are happy that I just send a monthly PDF with updates. The endless tinkering is still requested with the static reports, but that is much easier to deal with than serving up dashboards and tinkering with that.
analog31 4y ago
Whenever I see a "dashboard" I think of something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-DYW53-Rollin-Strollin-Dashboard/dp/B01N66XG9V https://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-DYW53-Rollin-Strollin-Da... It's a kids toy that lets them pretend they're driving the car.
monkeybutton 4y ago
People that run businesses and care about data don't want dashboards, they want spreadsheets. Lately I've been having some success with creating "user friendly" data views in big query and giving out access to them with connected Google sheets. If anyone wants to make a nice graph, pivot table or add their formulas to the workbooks they're free to do so using a tool they're already familiar with. The the data is backed by the database and can update on its own so we're not constantly sending out new versions of exported files.
- pplonski86 4y ago
  I would say it depends on data type and size. There are data sizes that would not fit in spreadsheets and need to be presented in a different way. BTW, I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheets + Python is very powerful connection :)
- pid-1 4y ago
  Excel can get data from APIs nowadays (and even use modern auth!). I've been reasonably successful at creating a data environment for my company in which all the data is exposed through REST APIs. The existing tooling for APIs in general is top notch. Also, you get a lot of architectural flexibility.
blagie 4y ago
Yes, I've found dashboards useful. Generalizations or problematic, since so much of this depends on industry, company, and role. I'm in an industry (education) where at-a-glance dashboards have a proven track record of dramatically improve learning outcomes. It turns out that: (1) Teachers, while believing they know their students, actually don't. Teachers also regularly fail to grasp what students do and don't understand. (2) Allowing teachers to monitor their students, both individually and classroom wide, leads to much better outcomes. In the context of a classroom, teachers are busy, non-technical (and sometimes incompetent), so an at-a-glance view is critical. For an example of real-time dashboarding done well, see Learning Catalytics. It grew out of a highly-respected physics education research project (Peer Instruction, by Eric Mazur), and allows teachers to monitor student understanding during lecture. Showing where misconceptions exist allows for deeper dives and deeper conversation. There are many systems like it, and ample evidence of improved student growth when they're used. That's very specific, I know, but there are similar examples in other industries I've worked in.
- urthor 4y ago
  Real time monitoring during a live task is certainly a use case I've never thought of. A very good point. I remember a piece on programming education research awhile ago. Said education outcomes improved considerably if you constantly bombard students with multiple choice questions. Administering that through a dashboard would be essential.
  - falcor84 4y ago
    > education outcomes improved considerably if you constantly bombard students with multiple choice questions I would love to read more about that, if you happen to have a link to share.
    - urthor 4y ago
      https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006023 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
enos-ape 4y ago
> I've only had dashboards requested by users with a dysfunctional relationship with engineering, in companies where the data is irrelevant. Sry, but this completly ... not true! Maybe in your subjective business environment, but definitely not for the whole community of python users. We are placed in a scientific environment, teamworking with highly dimensional data. Here there is not a single person who has time to tinker around with another ones code nor data structure. This will be a great benefit for regular report sessions - THX to the author!
cptaj 4y ago
I've found them very useful at impressing clients and getting contracts XD
sea-shunned 4y ago
Streamlit[0] was created specifically to create dashboards for ML/data science groups, and I've found it pretty useful. I've used it for research (model inspection and development), as well as teaching and it's been pretty useful for that. [0] - https://streamlit.io/ https://streamlit.io/

by urthor 4y ago

pid-1 4y ago

Yes I've seen many good uses of dashboards. That said, I totally get where are you coming from, been there as well.

cirgue 4y ago

Dashboards are really useful when you’re trying to distribute a set of metrics that large numbers of people actually need to know and agree on in order to do their jobs. Most metrics aren’t like this, so there are a lot of bad dashboards, but they definitely have their place. Edit: A good example of this is something like incoming shipments for a warehouse. Management all the way down to warehouse workers need to know what is slated for delivery, what’s already been delivered in the last few days, and what’s late.

javier_e06 4y ago

Look at my latest gizmo...on a drone! Look at my latest data crunch app...on the web! Yep, smells like management all over.

quinoablast 4y ago

You’re definitely right that metrics are often used as post-hoc justification of decisions already made. An example of actual dashboard culture is AWS’s operational metrics meetings. The construction of the dashboards themselves is scrutinized just as much as any latency or availability metric (may God have mercy on your soul if use a pie chart or display the median of metrics without justification). And it’s actually useful for surfacing issues and knowledge sharing. The frequent cadence can be a big cause if stress though. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/the-wheel/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/the-wheel/

nkrisc 4y ago

From the non-technical side: it isn’t necessarily that dashboards are not useful, it’s just that most people who want them don’t actually know what data is useful.

slowhand09 4y ago

Tons of good experience with dashboards. Managing Oracle databases? Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. Managing your investments? Schwab has a good interface.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jwithington 4y ago

I've certainly had your skepticism and these same challenges. Nonetheless, one study of Shopify storeowners who adopted dashboards saw a 4-10% increase in weekly revenue post adoption: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2022.1352 https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2022.135... But to your point there's often a principal agent problem in larger organizations. A decision-maker wants to appear "data-driven" so asks for a dashboard because it costs nothing for them to ask--someone else does the work. And when the dashboard shows something different than expected they dismiss the concern or find a reason that the dashboard is "wrong."

pplonski86 4y ago

You are lucky! There are many people that don't want to touch any code. Setting up a Python environment locally might be a big pain. That's a huge blocker for notebooks sharing. I treat dashboard as visualization part. What is more, visualized data is used to trigger further actions - for example, send alert email. Yes, I found them useful.

kulikalov 4y ago
You can share notebooks using hosted solutions
- pplonski86 4y ago
  Yes, that's the solution but only if you share with people that understand Python and if you are allowed to upload code + data to the cloud.
syntaxfree 4y ago
Docker?

Mehdi2277 4y ago

I quite like monitoring dashboards and use them frequently. Mainly for examining system health and debugging operational issues. My previous team had some business metric charts/dashboards related to system we worked on that we reviewed weekly. Most weeks review was it looks normal and was pretty fast review. Occasionally we'd see an unexpected deviation in some top level metric and that could trigger follow up work. Ideally all interesting deviations an alert would catch, but alerts are never complete. Most of dashboards I've cared for my team/department was primary user of. I have not made dashboards much for other stakeholders.

keithalewis 4y ago

“I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter." Sadly, your common sense observations will get belittled by the growing crowd of Liliputians who seem to enjoy celebrating their ignorance.

urthor 4y ago
I don't mean this as a criticism of the link author. Nobody wants to use a toilet plunger. You still want a good one. Merely an observation about the dashboard industry.

kulikalov 4y ago

Non-techies wielding SQL is a big advantage for sure, but a moderately complex dataset sends SQL aggregations complexity through the roof. While modern data warehouses can handle such queries, I can hardly imagine non-technical person being able to write it. That's where dashboards come in handy.

urthor 4y ago
Denormalized views? Every dashboard is an exercise in denormalization anyway. Certainly I would never expect people to be experts. SQL Group By is nontrivial.
- kulikalov 4y ago
  Still limited to 2-dimensional data. Data warehouses support structs and arrays, but it's not easy for a human to read.

apwheele 4y ago

Ditto, although for my applications they are not live (typical business processes lag by a month or more). So most of my stakeholders are happy that I just send a monthly PDF with updates. The endless tinkering is still requested with the static reports, but that is much easier to deal with than serving up dashboards and tinkering with that.

analog31 4y ago

Whenever I see a "dashboard" I think of something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-DYW53-Rollin-Strollin-Dashboard/dp/B01N66XG9V https://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-DYW53-Rollin-Strollin-Da... It's a kids toy that lets them pretend they're driving the car.

monkeybutton 4y ago

People that run businesses and care about data don't want dashboards, they want spreadsheets. Lately I've been having some success with creating "user friendly" data views in big query and giving out access to them with connected Google sheets. If anyone wants to make a nice graph, pivot table or add their formulas to the workbooks they're free to do so using a tool they're already familiar with. The the data is backed by the database and can update on its own so we're not constantly sending out new versions of exported files.

pplonski86 4y ago
I would say it depends on data type and size. There are data sizes that would not fit in spreadsheets and need to be presented in a different way. BTW, I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheets + Python is very powerful connection :)
pid-1 4y ago
Excel can get data from APIs nowadays (and even use modern auth!). I've been reasonably successful at creating a data environment for my company in which all the data is exposed through REST APIs. The existing tooling for APIs in general is top notch. Also, you get a lot of architectural flexibility.

blagie 4y ago

Yes, I've found dashboards useful. Generalizations or problematic, since so much of this depends on industry, company, and role. I'm in an industry (education) where at-a-glance dashboards have a proven track record of dramatically improve learning outcomes. It turns out that: (1) Teachers, while believing they know their students, actually don't. Teachers also regularly fail to grasp what students do and don't understand. (2) Allowing teachers to monitor their students, both individually and classroom wide, leads to much better outcomes. In the context of a classroom, teachers are busy, non-technical (and sometimes incompetent), so an at-a-glance view is critical. For an example of real-time dashboarding done well, see Learning Catalytics. It grew out of a highly-respected physics education research project (Peer Instruction, by Eric Mazur), and allows teachers to monitor student understanding during lecture. Showing where misconceptions exist allows for deeper dives and deeper conversation. There are many systems like it, and ample evidence of improved student growth when they're used. That's very specific, I know, but there are similar examples in other industries I've worked in.

urthor 4y ago
Real time monitoring during a live task is certainly a use case I've never thought of. A very good point. I remember a piece on programming education research awhile ago. Said education outcomes improved considerably if you constantly bombard students with multiple choice questions. Administering that through a dashboard would be essential.
- falcor84 4y ago
  > education outcomes improved considerably if you constantly bombard students with multiple choice questions I would love to read more about that, if you happen to have a link to share.
  - urthor 4y ago
    https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006023 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

enos-ape 4y ago

> I've only had dashboards requested by users with a dysfunctional relationship with engineering, in companies where the data is irrelevant. Sry, but this completly ... not true! Maybe in your subjective business environment, but definitely not for the whole community of python users. We are placed in a scientific environment, teamworking with highly dimensional data. Here there is not a single person who has time to tinker around with another ones code nor data structure. This will be a great benefit for regular report sessions - THX to the author!

cptaj 4y ago

I've found them very useful at impressing clients and getting contracts XD

sea-shunned 4y ago

Streamlit[0] was created specifically to create dashboards for ML/data science groups, and I've found it pretty useful. I've used it for research (model inspection and development), as well as teaching and it's been pretty useful for that. [0] - https://streamlit.io/ https://streamlit.io/