81–90 of 107 posts
i always assumed i have a good taste, and that my designs are good looking and should appeal to others
different people have a completely different idea on what is usable and what is a good taste, so just be open minded to listen and accommodate for the taste of others
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> 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.
Giving customers "secure" sql access was a must have feature from upper management, and it was very tricky/a nightmare to get right.
Customers actually liked it though, sql is king.
Advise I would give is make sure your analytics api's data models and queries are well though out and extensible. It makes it very hard to change them and rework the ux.
Lots of great suggestions here, but one I haven't seen is providing deep links. Let users share the exact state of their dashboard with others, ideally without requiring some convoluted system of logging in and sharing things. We implemented it by allowing a json config in the url, then providing a button to copy a shortened URL containing the whole config. Original creator of (the now woefully dated-looking) GBD Com…
Sharing the parameters, filters, etc.
Sharing the results.
They can both be very important.
Lots of great suggestions here, but one I haven't seen is providing deep links. Let users share the exact state of their dashboard with others, ideally without requiring some convoluted system of logging in and sharing things. We implemented it by allowing a json config in the url, then providing a button to copy a shortened URL containing the whole config. Original creator of (the now woefully dated-looking) GBD Com…
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> Have you ever had a decision maker who struggles to articulate what business decisions they want to improve? How do you handle that? Hah, 90% of the time. I think a big part at being good at this job is being able to coerce that information from people. You need a process of drilling down, kind of like the 5 Whys[0]. You want to make more profits, right? That means we need to either increase revenues or decrease co…
This is the right mindset for sure. Most of the time the initial question is very loosely defined, but actually having these conversations with the people who "want data", and helping them structure their thinking is also a hugely rewarding part of working in data and analytics, and will help you advance in your career. It can be easy to have a cynical view of what people are asking for, but in my experience there is…
I see tons of courses that teach “Excel skills”, but can’t find any that teach modeling using Excel.
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 obse…
Other times it’s because a supervisor or internal customer likes to see certain things on a chart, and putting the chart in Power BI/Tableau/other tool will make them prettier than Excel charts.
Very few people, starting from the top on down, have a good understanding that dashboards mean very little in and of themselves.
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Interesting - great points > Validation/testing has always been a challenge, especially given that dashboards are by definition quite “full stack” implementations where testing just the front end or back end is not sufficient and testing both in isolation can also often be challenging due to the huge possible variations in input data. Constantly evolving but I've always tried hard to keep calculations away from the d…
PowerBI is a WHOLE other can of fish - I haven't spent long enough with it to figure out how you build a test suite around that - but it sounds tricky!!
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Similarly titled towards finance. I specialize in what I'll call decision analytics for insurance underwriters. > Which means, the don’t even understand how un-intelligent their BI tool is or why the execs likely aren’t feeling like investing in BI has been worthwhile And this relates to what I was thinking about in my first comment. I once was conversing the COO of my company (my last job), at a 1000+ person company…
> He, point blank, said: "sometimes I don't even know what I'm asking for" Totally relate to that AND I'm often on the receiving end of those questions in a live setting (eg. board/exec meetings). Funny to stumble on this because just last week I told someone on our BI team, there is not any one "use case" I can lay out. The use case is this, assume I need to answer any random question that comes up. I need analytica…
I regularly tell customers "Open up this JSON, hit control f and search for the stats that you need." And they're like "Thank you, you just saved me 50000 hour of work."