4 ms·

A prime example of why dashboards are useless. Information that nobody needs (toilet flushes? ctrl, excuse me, apple-z's?) shown in a shiny way.

• bigx 12y ago
  A prime example of why comments are useless :) Opinions that nobody needs shown in a shiny website.
• nl 12y ago
  Information that nobody needs Wow. Toilet flushes: a significant change in the frequency of toilet flushes may indicate the spread of communicable diseases such as gastroenteritis, or community health problems like food poisoning. Apple-z: Clearly someone is having a lot of problems with whatever software they are using. There is a UX optimisation opportunity there.
  • TeMPOraL 12y ago
    > Toilet flushes: a significant change in the frequency of toilet flushes may indicate the spread of communicable diseases such as gastroenteritis, or community health problems like food poisoning. Well, you can't learn anything from just a number of today's flushes. With a proper chart graphing frequency over time and emphasizing changes, sure. But that's not what you get on the dashboard, at least without clicking. The lone number is useless. > Apple-z: Clearly someone is having a lot of problems with whatever software they are using. There is a UX optimisation opportunity there. Well, maybe. You can't tell from a lone number. Again, the graphs you can find when you click around could be useful, but not what you get by default. Information is useless if it doesn't help you make decisions.
    • ytechie 12y ago
      Hover over that tile and you get a (+). Click on that, and you can graph by day/month/year.
      • TeMPOraL 12y ago
        I know. But some (most?) of this data should be shown by default if you want to be able to just glance at the dashboard and learn anything useful.
  • EvilDavid75 12y ago
    If there is ONE thing that we are really interested in knowing: what side of the table football is statistically the best. That's a REAL insight.
  • normloman 12y ago
    I think you'd know if everyone in the office had food poisoning. Because everyone would be shitting their brains out.
• TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I agree. Now, it looks cute, I must say, but I think it's mostly useless. The industry now seems to be in the phase of cargo-culting measurements - all going "we have to put EVERYTHING on graphs!" without stopping for a moment and asking "what am I planning to do with this data?". Graphs, tables and other ways of representing data should be there to help you make decisions, not to just look cool. So yeah, go ahead and collect toilet flushing data; maybe you'll find something interesting there. But the way it's presented now, most of that data is useless. The number of toilet flushes since today morning doesn't really tell you anything without context. Even "x% above/below average of last week", or better, a sparkline of previous week's worth of data would give you some baseline that could let you interpret that flush count in a useful way. Basically, my gripe with people in IoT and Quantified Self is that they totally cargo-cult graphs and dashboards.
  • bigx 12y ago
    It's just a fun experiment for an agency to get into IoT and then be able to provide nice IoT stuff to their clients, data is presented as "Real-time [un]interesting data". No cult here, just fun experiment.
    • TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Sure, but I used it to make a general point. A lot of "serious" IoT and QS startups seem to make that mistake.