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Ask HN: Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?

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Re: Ask HN: Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?

#31

Post by eitally »

itsoktocry wrote: post #29

I've worked in many analytics projects across a number of companies as a consultant. I'm a big believer in "decision support systems". Find out what decisions your customers need to make, repeatedly, to their job. Quantify the heuristics and visualize that information (and that information only) in an easy to consume manner. More often than not that's an email or PDF . Another advantage is that by supporting the busi…

This is it, really. I remember back during a previous section of my career when I was running BI for a manufacturing company. We were asked to web-ify some legacy reports that either ran on desktops using Access & Excel or were on older BI products (Cognos). It was shocking -- at the time (I was naive) -- how many business requirements were essentially "replicate Excel in a browser", and completely divorced from the actual business processes and decisions that needed to be made.

Also, it might surprise a lot of less experienced developers just how many reporting tools are actually pieces of a workflow, not just reports. If you sniff this out during the requirements phase, do your best to convert these reports into features of an actual workflow app/system rather than allow them to persist as standalone reports.

Re: Ask HN: Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?

#32

Post by tobr »

In my experience, if your plan is to make a “dashboard”, you’re already on the wrong path. It’s too generic and says nothing about what problems you are there to solve. Think about it yourself: in how many of the products that are important in your life is there any meaningful value produced by a dashboard?

Dashboards seem alluring because we imagine that users will sit there and somehow have insights delivered to them automatically. It’s often less clear what those insights will be or what is needed to produce them, we somehow hope they will materialize by just displaying some data. Often the focus is on making pretty-looking charts (which only ever look good when you demo with picturesque fake data), because you want the product to feel colorful, welcoming and visual.

A better approach is to either make a focused tool for solving a specific problem you know users have - you won’t think of what you end up with as a “dashboard” but it might occasionally end up looking a little like one - or to make general tools that allow users to dig through data interactively to find the things they care about.

Re: Ask HN: Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?

#33

Post by itsoktocry »

mushufasa wrote: post #20
grvdrm wrote: post #8

I'll enjoy watching this thread evolve. Some thoughts from my experience: - Everyone asks to translate simpler spreadsheets and Excel charts/graphs into dashboards in your BI tool of choice. As soon as it's there, they'll ask you why they can't export to manage the data themselves. This vicious cycle can sometimes be stopped but is a slow-motion drag on productivity in lots of orgs. - Build in validations, and/or wor…

> Finally, I think most dashboards miss one fundamental point. Imagine you're the CEO/COO and you've got this beautiful 3 or 4-chart dashboard in front of you. What should you know about what you're seeing? What's the succinct summary? Having been on both sides of this, I think the challenge is that the CEO/COO's job is to figure out "what should we do about this?," which is the right approach to coming up with that…

>I think the challenge is that the CEO/COO's job is to figure out "what should we do about this?

Totally agree. I'd even go a little further and say the business is in trouble if the CEO doesn't know "what we should do about this". It's the CEOs job to know those things, and it's the data team's job to provide the tools to make those decisions easier, faster and better.

Re: Ask HN: Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?

#37

Post by itsoktocry »

eitally wrote: post #31
itsoktocry wrote: post #29

I've worked in many analytics projects across a number of companies as a consultant. I'm a big believer in "decision support systems". Find out what decisions your customers need to make, repeatedly, to their job. Quantify the heuristics and visualize that information (and that information only) in an easy to consume manner. More often than not that's an email or PDF . Another advantage is that by supporting the busi…

This is it, really. I remember back during a previous section of my career when I was running BI for a manufacturing company. We were asked to web-ify some legacy reports that either ran on desktops using Access & Excel or were on older BI products (Cognos). It was shocking -- at the time (I was naive) -- how many business requirements were essentially "replicate Excel in a browser", and completely divorced from the…

>either ran on desktops using Access & Excel or were on older BI products (Cognos). It was shocking -- at the time (I was naive)

I think some people have a skewed view if they do most of their work with VC funded/SV companies. The average person at these companies is way more data savvy than average.

But there are so many companies out there that make a ton of money and have data-unsophisticated-but-domain-wise users, and old systems. Low hanging fruit.

Re: Ask HN: Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?

#38

Post by bumby »

itsoktocry wrote: post #29

I've worked in many analytics projects across a number of companies as a consultant. I'm a big believer in "decision support systems". Find out what decisions your customers need to make, repeatedly, to their job. Quantify the heuristics and visualize that information (and that information only) in an easy to consume manner. More often than not that's an email or PDF . Another advantage is that by supporting the busi…

Have you ever had a decision maker who struggles to articulate what business decisions they want to improve? How do you handle that?

I’ve heard pretty high-level managers respond to that question with things like “we were hoping your data would tell us” in response and I’m not sure what to make of it.

Re: Ask HN: Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?

#39

Post by sceaux »

About a year ago my (new-ish founder) boss came to me and asked me to build him a custom dashboard. "I have all the data in a spreadsheet but I want it in a dashboard" he said. I was a specialized systems dev, only occasionally doing a bit of webdev if necessary and really didn't have time for those kind of errands.

I showed him this tutorial I had recently seen. Just a few minutes and the thumbnail, about how to build a "dashboard" in excel. https://youtu.be/z26zbiGJnd4?si=HWn8qTbozD8vmXiF

"Oh wow, I didn't know excel could look so beautiful!". He asked for the link, never did anything with it of course but was totally satisfied. I am pretty sure he just wanted a shiny toy and also felt inadequate about "just using excel" to do his important founder work. Showing him that excel can look beautiful and is a powerful tool was enough. No more feeling inadequate, no need for an actual (or even excel) dashboard.

Re: Ask HN: Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?

#40

Post by clusterhacks »

grvdrm wrote: post #8

I'll enjoy watching this thread evolve. Some thoughts from my experience: - Everyone asks to translate simpler spreadsheets and Excel charts/graphs into dashboards in your BI tool of choice. As soon as it's there, they'll ask you why they can't export to manage the data themselves. This vicious cycle can sometimes be stopped but is a slow-motion drag on productivity in lots of orgs. - Build in validations, and/or wor…

"Business users often ask for things without an ounce of rationale."

Deserves extra upvotes just for this statement.

This has always been painful to me working in the data analysis and reporting space. When I get many requests for dashboards or reports that lack an answer to the question of "how will this be used?", I seem to find the requesting groups are cost-centers in the larger organization and are somewhat obsessed with processes and procedures.

This is rarely a good group to build a career with . . .

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