12 ms·

The laws of shitty dashboards

231 points by paulcothenet 12y ago

grimtrigger 12y ago
> 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.
jwillgoesfast 12y ago
>"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 12y ago
  I can only agree. Especially real-time data. There are only a few cases where real-time might be usefull
  - mehh 12y ago
    If you have a site delivering real time content, such as news, its pretty important.
    - yummyfajitas 12y ago
      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.
- MartyHoekstra 12y ago
  And often, the end user has no idea what information is useful to them until it is presented. In that way dashboards are great: they help the end user figure out what data is important to them.
error54 12y ago
>"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.
- pyvpx 12y ago
  precisely. try running a network of any appreciable throughput (10G+) with 5-minute averages.
- je42 12y ago
  Or you release a new version of a game and you notice your arpdau tanks. ;)
  - je42 12y ago
    Or try to instrument any analytics - and wait to verify they show up in the dashboard correctly.
    - luos 12y ago
      Or you are a small business owner who just likes to watch what the users are doing in realtime, for fun. Like my mom :)
- hvass 12y ago
  The heuristic whether to use real-time information is the following and I am paraphrasing Avinash Kaushik: "Will a decision be made in real-time based on this information?"
- saosebastiao 12y ago
  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.
mehh 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      People don't need to be experts to recognize flaws in tools aimed at consumers.
      - Gigablah 12y ago
        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 12y ago
skybrian 12y ago
I was hoping for an article that would explain how to design a good dashboard. This isn't it.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  There are heuristics in the piece which are useful. The most critical piece though is: is the data being presented actionable? Can I do something with it, do I need to do something with it, does it tell me when I need to do something? Think of the most common dashboard: a car. It tells you how fast you're going (speedometer), how much fuel you've got, how far you've gone (trip/odometer). Indicators for services or features enabled (lights, hi-beams, turn indicators, hazards). Problems (engine temp, problem lights). Maybe a tach. Automatic transmission indicator, if applicable. Other chrome is possible: outside temps, compass, and comfort/environment controls (heat/AC, sound system). But essentially it's a few crucial indicators which either give you current status or tell you there's a problem. It's not a bad model to start with.
- vitovito 12y ago
  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."
TheAwesomeA 12y ago
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 12y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316264
hvass 12y ago
I recommend two resources on creating dashboards, both from very experienced practitioners: 1) http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-dashboards-strategic-tactical-best-practices-tips-examples/ http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-dashboards-strategic-... 2) Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few - http://www.amazon.ca/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-Communication/dp/0596100167 http://www.amazon.ca/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-...
- travem 12y ago
  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.
wyc 12y ago
"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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    What engine-critical information would you replace the extra real-estate with?
    - jackmoore 12y ago
      Nothing is always an option. Including anything that is unhelpful dilutes focus on the things that are.
- jodrellblank 12y ago
  We're talking about an automatic car - make the ECU take over so you can't redline it.
aunty_helen 12y ago
>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.
- cvburgess 12y ago
  This is not true. The check engine light can come on in some cars if the gas cap is not screwed on tight enough - easily fixed yet treated as serious as a major engine malfunction.
  - ams6110 12y ago
    It can also come on for no apparent reason. Mine is on right now. Gas cap is tight, car is running fine. Starts right up, runs smooth, power is good, fuel economy normal. So I'm not going to take it into the shop. In this day and age we can have something more informative than a check engine light. Tell me what's wrong, or at least have a "verbose" option I can enable that will let me see WTF it thinks the problem is. I think the check engine light is a giant scam to get people to take their car in for service when there is nothing wrong with it.
    - jschwartzi 12y ago
      My OBD-I truck had a pair of pins that, when shorted together with a paperclip, would read out the exact trouble code through the check engine light. As far as a verbose option, if you pull into an O'Reilly's or other auto parts store they will lend you, for free, an OBD-II scan tool with which you can read out the exact error plus any corresponding sensor data(freeze frame). If your check engine light isn't flashing, it's actually because your vehicle has detected an issue with your emissions equipment that means that the engine control module is not able to regulate emissions to within EPA requirements. There are various reasons why this could be the case, but it usually indicates an imminent failure. For example, mine is currently on because it's detecting a lean fuel condition in the cylinder bank when under high load, which means either that my fuel injection system is not able to keep up or that my throttle is letting too much air into the intake manifold. My car is still drive-able, but I definitely need to have it looked at because my fuel pump or injectors could be going out or my throttle could be faulty. The point is that it's not a scam, it's providing you useful, predictive information. You just need to know how to retrieve it.
com2kid 12y ago
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.
rdtsc 12y ago
> 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.
- paulojreis 12y ago
  > That is demands often are perverted and sometimes it just comes from an exec wanting to see some "action" or gaining "visibility". Yup. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of time lost on executive or PM useless whims (and how much good could have been achieved with that time and resources).
- dunmalg 12y ago
  >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.
coldcode 12y ago
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.
capkutay 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
chavesn 12y ago
Am I the only one that doesn't get the joke about what's wrong with "Last 14 days" and "Last 12 months"?
- sejje 12y ago
  No. I can't figure out if he doesn't like the phrasing (instead of "last year," maybe) or thinks the time period is not useful. Generally speaking, especially near the beginning of the year, I often find "last 12 months" to be far more useful than "this year," which he didn't call out.
  - sschueller 12y ago
    Maybe "Fortnight" instead of 14 days would look better. :)
- unterstrom 12y ago
  No you're not. I don't get it either.
- swat535 12y ago
  the option right below it mentions "This year.."
  - Romdeau 12y ago
    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...
  - gordjw 12y ago
    One is calendar (or financial) year, the other is a rolling 12 months from today.
- paulcothenet 12y ago
  Had meant to point at "Last 6 months". (Last 12 months is often useful) IHMO, it clutters the options with options that are not useful (do you often look at your 14 days spending?) and already included in other options that are close.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hongkongsmog 12y ago
Tableau is an awesome data aggregate and dashboard program.
- Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
  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.
dredmorbius 12y ago
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 sht 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 12y ago
  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?"
  - potatosareok 12y ago
    I was wondering about that too. At my work they extensively use Wily Introscope performance monitoring. It's my first job, so I don't know what other options there are, but Wily seems pretty useful in providing real time and historical data about JVM based applications, as well as other components we use like message queues, time taken by SQL statements, as well as other configurable metrics like process/thread counts, CPU useage, etc. Wily has dashboards about overall application stats that you can configure, as well as dashboards (?) on a per application level. So I can take a look and see the threads on one JVM are getting stuck and also some SQL statements/service calls are taking longer then expected on that same JVM/overall application. Also useful in dashboards on a per datacenter level to help figure out what's going on. I'm genuinely curious, because I don't know any better, how do other companies monitor their applications? Anyone else have any comments about Wily monitoring?
userbinator 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
    - 12y ago
bradbeattie 12y ago
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.
siganakis 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
dmourati 12y ago
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.
e0m 12y ago
What are people's favorite examples of good dashboards?
michaelbuckbee 12y ago
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-b586-6d8f36b0bf16/49ce67dce8d264dd336469060a9af924 https://www.evernote.com/shard/s16/sh/c8cdeadc-643d-4028-b58... 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
gear54rus 12y ago
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..
pbreit 12y ago
I suspect the author is probably right but didn't glean much actionable from the post.
- coldtea 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
ejain 12y ago
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).
philmcnamara 12y ago
Any examples of great dashboards that people love?
jasonwen 12y ago
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.
reitanqild 12y ago
> 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.
VLM 12y ago
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..."
teachingaway 12y ago
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
ajuc 12y ago
Jira dashboard is actually useful. At least when you choose the right widgets.
mwetzler 12y ago
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.

231 points by paulcothenet 12y ago

> 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.

jwillgoesfast 12y ago

>"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 12y ago
I can only agree. Especially real-time data. There are only a few cases where real-time might be usefull
- mehh 12y ago
  If you have a site delivering real time content, such as news, its pretty important.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    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.
MartyHoekstra 12y ago
And often, the end user has no idea what information is useful to them until it is presented. In that way dashboards are great: they help the end user figure out what data is important to them.

error54 12y ago

>"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.

pyvpx 12y ago
precisely. try running a network of any appreciable throughput (10G+) with 5-minute averages.
je42 12y ago
Or you release a new version of a game and you notice your arpdau tanks. ;)
- je42 12y ago
  Or try to instrument any analytics - and wait to verify they show up in the dashboard correctly.
  - luos 12y ago
    Or you are a small business owner who just likes to watch what the users are doing in realtime, for fun. Like my mom :)
hvass 12y ago
The heuristic whether to use real-time information is the following and I am paraphrasing Avinash Kaushik: "Will a decision be made in real-time based on this information?"
saosebastiao 12y ago
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.

mehh 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    People don't need to be experts to recognize flaws in tools aimed at consumers.
    - Gigablah 12y ago
      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 12y ago

skybrian 12y ago

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

dredmorbius 12y ago
There are heuristics in the piece which are useful. The most critical piece though is: is the data being presented actionable? Can I do something with it, do I need to do something with it, does it tell me when I need to do something? Think of the most common dashboard: a car. It tells you how fast you're going (speedometer), how much fuel you've got, how far you've gone (trip/odometer). Indicators for services or features enabled (lights, hi-beams, turn indicators, hazards). Problems (engine temp, problem lights). Maybe a tach. Automatic transmission indicator, if applicable. Other chrome is possible: outside temps, compass, and comfort/environment controls (heat/AC, sound system). But essentially it's a few crucial indicators which either give you current status or tell you there's a problem. It's not a bad model to start with.
vitovito 12y ago
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."

TheAwesomeA 12y ago

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 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316264

hvass 12y ago

I recommend two resources on creating dashboards, both from very experienced practitioners: 1) http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-dashboards-strategic-tactical-best-practices-tips-examples/ http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-dashboards-strategic-... 2) Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few - http://www.amazon.ca/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-Communication/dp/0596100167 http://www.amazon.ca/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-...

travem 12y ago
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.

wyc 12y ago

"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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  What engine-critical information would you replace the extra real-estate with?
  - jackmoore 12y ago
    Nothing is always an option. Including anything that is unhelpful dilutes focus on the things that are.
jodrellblank 12y ago
We're talking about an automatic car - make the ECU take over so you can't redline it.

aunty_helen 12y ago

>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.

cvburgess 12y ago
This is not true. The check engine light can come on in some cars if the gas cap is not screwed on tight enough - easily fixed yet treated as serious as a major engine malfunction.
- ams6110 12y ago
  It can also come on for no apparent reason. Mine is on right now. Gas cap is tight, car is running fine. Starts right up, runs smooth, power is good, fuel economy normal. So I'm not going to take it into the shop. In this day and age we can have something more informative than a check engine light. Tell me what's wrong, or at least have a "verbose" option I can enable that will let me see WTF it thinks the problem is. I think the check engine light is a giant scam to get people to take their car in for service when there is nothing wrong with it.
  - jschwartzi 12y ago
    My OBD-I truck had a pair of pins that, when shorted together with a paperclip, would read out the exact trouble code through the check engine light. As far as a verbose option, if you pull into an O'Reilly's or other auto parts store they will lend you, for free, an OBD-II scan tool with which you can read out the exact error plus any corresponding sensor data(freeze frame). If your check engine light isn't flashing, it's actually because your vehicle has detected an issue with your emissions equipment that means that the engine control module is not able to regulate emissions to within EPA requirements. There are various reasons why this could be the case, but it usually indicates an imminent failure. For example, mine is currently on because it's detecting a lean fuel condition in the cylinder bank when under high load, which means either that my fuel injection system is not able to keep up or that my throttle is letting too much air into the intake manifold. My car is still drive-able, but I definitely need to have it looked at because my fuel pump or injectors could be going out or my throttle could be faulty. The point is that it's not a scam, it's providing you useful, predictive information. You just need to know how to retrieve it.

com2kid 12y ago

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.

rdtsc 12y ago

> 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.

paulojreis 12y ago
> That is demands often are perverted and sometimes it just comes from an exec wanting to see some "action" or gaining "visibility". Yup. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of time lost on executive or PM useless whims (and how much good could have been achieved with that time and resources).
dunmalg 12y ago
>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.

coldcode 12y ago

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.

capkutay 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

chavesn 12y ago

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

sejje 12y ago
No. I can't figure out if he doesn't like the phrasing (instead of "last year," maybe) or thinks the time period is not useful. Generally speaking, especially near the beginning of the year, I often find "last 12 months" to be far more useful than "this year," which he didn't call out.
- sschueller 12y ago
  Maybe "Fortnight" instead of 14 days would look better. :)
unterstrom 12y ago
No you're not. I don't get it either.
swat535 12y ago
the option right below it mentions "This year.."
- Romdeau 12y ago
  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...
- gordjw 12y ago
  One is calendar (or financial) year, the other is a rolling 12 months from today.
paulcothenet 12y ago
Had meant to point at "Last 6 months". (Last 12 months is often useful) IHMO, it clutters the options with options that are not useful (do you often look at your 14 days spending?) and already included in other options that are close.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

hongkongsmog 12y ago

Tableau is an awesome data aggregate and dashboard program.

Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
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.

dredmorbius 12y ago

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 sht 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 12y ago
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?"
- potatosareok 12y ago
  I was wondering about that too. At my work they extensively use Wily Introscope performance monitoring. It's my first job, so I don't know what other options there are, but Wily seems pretty useful in providing real time and historical data about JVM based applications, as well as other components we use like message queues, time taken by SQL statements, as well as other configurable metrics like process/thread counts, CPU useage, etc. Wily has dashboards about overall application stats that you can configure, as well as dashboards (?) on a per application level. So I can take a look and see the threads on one JVM are getting stuck and also some SQL statements/service calls are taking longer then expected on that same JVM/overall application. Also useful in dashboards on a per datacenter level to help figure out what's going on. I'm genuinely curious, because I don't know any better, how do other companies monitor their applications? Anyone else have any comments about Wily monitoring?

userbinator 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
  - 12y ago

bradbeattie 12y ago

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.

siganakis 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.

dmourati 12y ago

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.

e0m 12y ago

What are people's favorite examples of good dashboards?

michaelbuckbee 12y ago

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

gear54rus 12y ago

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..

pbreit 12y ago

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

coldtea 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

ejain 12y ago

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).

philmcnamara 12y ago

Any examples of great dashboards that people love?

jasonwen 12y ago

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.

reitanqild 12y ago

> 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.

VLM 12y ago

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..."

teachingaway 12y ago

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

ajuc 12y ago

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

mwetzler 12y ago

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.