I love a good
dashboard- really I do. So, you'd think I'd be pleased that a trend seems to be
emerging that has more business folks becoming aware of dashboards and, by
extension wanting to make use of them. But I'm not. Sure, I'm all for the
opportunity to provide insight and a better means of managing business
operations with an effective dashboard, but the trouble is far too many of the
dashboards I've seen built don't do that. Sure, they're flashy, with widgets
and gauges galore and often even visually appealing at first glance, but
they're simply not designed to give the right sort of insight, or provide that
insight in a way that allows them to be used effectively and efficiently. Now
that's often not the fault of the person charged with designing the dashboard
it may stem all the way back to the client - the person requesting the
dashboard.
Unless you have a
long standing relationship with your client, excellent rapport and tremendous
trust it's unlikely that you'll have carte blanche to determine how they
dashboard should look. In the majority of cases they will have come to you with
a design already in mind. Chances are that that design will have been
influenced by what they've seen elsewhere - be it in other dashboards, or in
advertising from dashboard vendors or implementation consulting firms, many of
whom seem to promote [just] the eye-catching nature of dashboards, showing off the
latest and greatest controls and visual capabilities. And here's the hard pill
to swallow, no matter how many of Few's books you've read, no matter how many
industry awards you may have won for your prior dashboards, no matter if you
have a PhD with a thesis written on visual cues and how people respond to them,
your client is still likely to look at your with a mixture of confusion and
disappointment if you suggest alternative design and layout options which are
too far apart from their own ideas. If you just build and present him or her
with what you believe is the better option then 8 or 9 times out of 10 he'll
say it's not what he asked for or wants. Push the issue, spouting all of the
theory you like, and you'll do little more than back him into a corner. He'll
still want the same design, you'll still need to build it, and the company will
have an ineffective dashboard - no-one wins in this situation.
So, what's the
answer? Why not build prototypes for both - build him his, but also build what
you think will work. Give your client what he wants and you may in turn get
what you want, either through the chance to explain why you believe you
dashboard layout is more effective, or he may just see it for himself and have
a eureka moment. At the very least you will have opened the door for a
discussion and now be better placed to have a conversation about the things you
really need to know - what's the core aim of the dashboard, who will its
audience be and what behaviour is it trying to produce, etc. And, who knows, the same may happen in
reverse, having seen your client's option made real you might have a similar moment
and realise that it does in fact work more effectively than your own concept.
That's not a bad thing, the company will have a usable and useful dashboard and
you'll have discovered another design pattern that you can store away to be
leveraged later.
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