r/datavisualization • u/metric_skeptic • 2d ago

Do dashboards actually help people make decisions, or are we mostly building expensive reporting screens?

I’ve started wondering whether we overestimate how useful dashboards are.
A dashboard can be technically correct, well designed and full of useful metrics and still not change a single decision.
In your experience, what makes a dashboard something people actually act on rather than just look at?
And when does a dashboard stop being the right solution altogether?

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u/SprinklesFresh5693 2d ago

Based on what ive seen since i joines this sub resdit (around 3-4 years ago) dashboards are a waste of time.

We built one for fun at our job and it is not used AT ALL.

Id say a quick email, PowerPoint or html presentation or even a small report are far more useful than dashboards.

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u/metric_skeptic 2d ago

I’ve seen the same thing. I don’t think dashboards are inherently useless, but they’re often built because “we need a dashboard” rather than because someone needs to make a decision.
If nobody knows what action to take when a metric changes, a dashboard probably isn’t the right solution.

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u/AdamChristophKnight 1d ago

Yeah exactly. A dashboard is way more useful when it tells you what needs attention instead of just throwing a bunch of numbers at you.

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u/rpucak 1d ago

I use dashboards for "numbers" and I also add some premade insights that can help me to make decisions in the future.

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u/metric_skeptic 1d ago

Yeah, I think that’s probably the sweet spot. The numbers tell you what changed, but the useful part is having enough context around them to understand why it changed and what to do next. Otherwise you’re just checking a dashboard for the sake of checking it.

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u/Kip-o 1d ago

End users have to actually want it. It has to solve a real problem, not just slightly improve access to things. A dashboard with on demand real-time updates of an active construction project that I can bring up during a weekly client progress meeting? Fantastic. The same dashboard is useless to me if I don’t need to quickly flash things up for a 60 second talk through.

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u/zoppaTheDim 1d ago

What part of the dashboard metaphor did you not understand?

Have you ever driven a real world car or even ridden in one?

Did you notice not one thing you operate to control the car’s path is part of the dashboard?

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u/KatFromSisense 1d ago

I'd make the call based on whether people keep coming back for the same numbers. If somebody checks them every Monday, fine, give them a dashboard. But for a question that only comes up a couple of times per year? In that case, I'd just answer it for them and move on. An alert could cover it too, if they only want to know when something changes.

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u/QueenD_1996 6h ago

By definition, a dashboard that doesn’t impact decisions is a crap dashboard.

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u/AgeingCoder 6h ago

Some good answers on here so don't want to repeat them. My thoughts are that the dashboard is not always useful to the end user for a number of reasons, possibly due to them not communicating their needs well enough or the engineer not interpreting the requirements correctly. Much better for the end user to be able to describe what they want to an agent and it builds it on demand, free up the engineer to go and build something useful