A dashboard that reports is a dashboard that informs. A dashboard that drives decisions is a dashboard that changes behavior. The difference between the two is not visual design — it is the discipline of connecting the metrics displayed to the decisions that users need to make. Most operational dashboards in enterprise organizations were built to answer the question “what happened?” The dashboards that drive business performance are the ones built to answer the question “what should we do now?”
Starting With the Decision, Not the Data
Dashboard design that starts with the available data produces a display of what can be shown. Dashboard design that starts with the decisions the user needs to make produces a display of what the user needs to see. The first conversation in any dashboard design project should be: what are the top three decisions this user or team makes regularly that this dashboard should support? Each of those decisions has a set of information requirements — the metrics, comparisons, trends, and exceptions that the user needs to see in order to make the decision well. Those information requirements define the dashboard content.
The Metrics That Drive Action
Metrics drive action when they meet three criteria. They are actionable — the user can do something in response to what the metric shows. They are current — the metric reflects a recent enough state of the business that the action it suggests is still relevant. And they are owned — there is a specific person or team responsible for the metric and accountable for its performance. Metrics that fail any of these criteria produce reports that are read without response. Metrics that meet all three produce behavior change — which is the only outcome that justifies the investment in a dashboard.
Exception-Based Design
A dashboard that shows every metric in every state is a dashboard that requires its users to find the signal in the noise. A dashboard designed around exceptions — showing metrics prominently only when they fall outside defined normal ranges — focuses user attention on the situations that require action and reduces the cognitive load of interpreting a display that is always full of information. The discipline of exception-based design is defining the thresholds that distinguish normal from abnormal for each metric, which requires the analytical work of understanding what normal actually is — another task that most organizations skip.