Am I the only one that doesn't get the joke about what's wrong with "Last 14 days" and "Last 12 months"?
The laws of shitty dashboards
31–40 of 126 posts
Re: The laws of shitty dashboards
#32"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
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?
What engine-critical information would you replace the extra real-estate with?
Re: The laws of shitty dashboards
#33[deleted]
Re: The laws of shitty dashboards
#34Am I the only one that doesn't get the joke about what's wrong with "Last 14 days" and "Last 12 months"?
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.
Re: The laws of shitty dashboards
#35From 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.
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.
Re: The laws of shitty dashboards
#36So, 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?
Re: The laws of shitty dashboards
#37Am I the only one that doesn't get the joke about what's wrong with "Last 14 days" and "Last 12 months"?
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.
Maybe "Fortnight" instead of 14 days would look better. :)
Re: The laws of shitty dashboards
#38Tableau is an awesome data aggregate and dashboard program.
Re: The laws of shitty dashboards
#39>"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.
He should have differentiated operational metrics from product (or business) metrics. He seems to be talking about the latter categories.
Re: The laws of shitty dashboards
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
What engine-critical information would you replace the extra real-estate with?
Nothing is always an option. Including anything that is unhelpful dilutes focus on the things that are.