We love data because having reliable and well organized data helps us make better decisions. Since that’s true, we really love the dashboards that give us quick and easy access to those data. Dashboards make our lives easier! Dashboards are so universally loved that everyone wants access to them and everyone has a wishlist for what they want to see represented on the dashboard. One challenge we struggle with then, especially as more and more people weigh in on what to include on our dashboards and in our reports, is scope creep and bloat. Often we end up with dashboards that are unwieldy and overwhelming. As a result our dashboards sometimes become unreadable, or worse, unenlightening.
What is the actual purpose of a dashboard? It’s helpful to make comparisons to another kind of physical dashboard that is ubiquitous and that many of us use on a daily basis: the dashboard in your car. While driving, there are certain metrics that you are regularly watching, like your speed. To a certain extent you know more or less what this is showing because you have a keen and kinetic sense for how fast you are going... usually. Because if you don’t keep your eye on the speedometer, it’s easy to get pulled over for speeding. Just like at work where someone will alert you to the fact that you are not meeting expectations, there are consequences, like a policeman issuing a citation.
This isn’t always the case. There are often times that you are not watching the speedometer very closely because you don’t need to. Some of your driving is stop-and-go, or in neighborhoods or residential zones. In cases like these, you’re not concerned about your speed because you’re not even approaching the limit. You know more or less where you are, and you’re just not concerned about a higher degree of accuracy at this very moment because that level of detail is not relevant. Even at these slower speeds though, there are things that will come up that will cause you to pay close attention to the dashboard, so thank goodness you have access to this tool: There are school zone limits, or city limits when you’re driving in rural areas, both of which can be much slower than you have been going. You anticipate and you know quickly enough that you need to adjust your speed, and the tool makes it easy to do that.
There are other, different metrics on your car dashboard that you watch regularly but far less frequently, like your gas meter. Again, you often have a good sense for this metric and where you are with respect to where you need to be. When you’ve just filled up the car, you don’t even think about it for a while because there’s no need to. You start to watch it as it gets closer to empty. You pay attention to it when you’re preparing for a longer trip and want to avoid having to take inconvenient action later. You notice when it does get dangerously low because the dashboard is cleverly designed to alert you to that, almost always with a light of some kind, sometimes with a sound. At any rate, the consequences of neglecting this gauge entirely can be dire. Running out of gas is at least very inconvenient! There is a time cost because you’re going to be late, not to mention the logistics of getting your car taken care of, refueled, etc. Even beyond that though, precisely where you run out of gas could even be dangerous if it’s on a freeway, in the middle of nowhere, or during a weather event of some kind (extreme hot or cold temperatures). You’re at the mercy of whatever help you can muster from external forces.
And then there are metrics on your car dashboard that you watch occasionally or rarely, but still very importantly, such as your oil gauge. There’s probably a sticker in your car telling you that you’ll need to think about this again in three months or in 5,000 miles or some other far-off number that you’re not concerned about at the moment. The time frame and distance are so beyond your immediate issues that you dismiss them outright. Even then, there aren’t necessarily immediate consequences for not addressing the warning signs of this gauge. How far or long can you go without getting your oil changed after you’re due? Quite a while in fact. These consequences are more long-term, but graver and more expensive in the long run. They’re also more unpredictable, down to the nagging and increasing knowledge that there is something wrong with your car and you’re going to need possibly even to replace it.
Our data dashboards are like this too. They Include metrics that we need to monitor constantly, metrics we need to watch regularly, and metrics we need to watch occasionally, and the implications and consequences are not entirely dissimilar from those for the dashboard of your car.
Sometimes the metrics on our dashboards become irrelevant, and it can be difficult to acknowledge when this is the case. Consider the tachometer that measures the working speed of your engine in revolutions per second. This was a highly relevant metric when cars were primarily equipped with manual transmission requiring the driver to shift between gears. Now that car transmissions are primarily automatic (at least in the US), this is a far less useful metric taking up valuable space on the dashboard. How much real estate on our dashboards is used up by less useful or increasingly irrelevant metrics?
One final apt comparison with your car: Good car dashboards are designed to be quickly and easily navigable because as a driver you have very limited attention that you can direct to something else. We design our dashboards to prioritize knowledge transfer based on importance and urgency, which we also define strategically. There are plenty of other metrics in the car that we want to keep track of: the climate from air conditioning and heat, the sound system, the phone pairing… But these generally are not related to safety and performance. They’re more related to comfort and convenience, so we put them elsewhere. They don’t belong immediately in front of us so we want to put them somewhere where they’re still convenient but not urgent. We experience this acutely for instance in picking up a rental car, like at the airport. If you’re willing to put in a little more time, you can figure out all of the controls including the stereo, the temperature, and literally anything and everything else. You can probably get away with doing that on the fly, but of course it’s much safer to take the time to do it before you leave. On the other hand you are far more able to drive off the lot immediately knowing what you need to know because the car is designed to show you how to keep track of those things—speed, windshield wipers, lights—instantaneously.
If we don’t resist the urge to prioritize the data we track and strategically build the dashboard we use to track them, we risk more than the comfort or ease of doing our work, we risk our safety.