Dashboards

Dashboards that answer a few questions well

A dashboard is a promise that the right people can answer the right questions at a glance. Most dashboards break that promise by trying to answer every question at once. Thirty tiles, six filters and a color legend nobody reads.

This section is about building fewer, better dashboards. We cover KPI selection, layout order, targets and thresholds, refresh timing and how to show data freshness and gaps on the page itself. We'll often argue for removing a chart rather than adding one. When we look at KPI dashboards for a specific industry, like our piece on law firm lead tracking, we start from the decision the page supports and work backward to the data.

Coming up here: getting started with dashboards, and beginner advice on choosing the first five KPIs.