[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.

[hjkm]

I think that's a really useful thought exercise. FYI I posted this thread - could we interview you about this for our article? Just 10 mins. I'm at harry[at]embeddable.com.