Ask HN: Lessons learned from implementing user-facing analytics / dashboards?
I&#x27;ll enjoy watching this thread evolve. Some thoughts from my experience:<p>- Everyone asks to translate simpler spreadsheets and Excel charts&#x2F;graphs into dashboards in your BI tool of choice. As soon as it&#x27;s there, they&#x27;ll ask you why they can&#x27;t export to manage the data themselves. This vicious cycle can sometimes be stopped but is a slow-motion drag on productivity in lots of orgs.<p>- Build in validations, and&#x2F;or work on ways to check the dashboard. Dashboards sometimes put their builders and consumers on auto-pilot. The dashboard &quot;must be right&quot; but could easily have a bug or inaccuracy for weeks&#x2F;months&#x2F;etc. that isn&#x27;t obvious without some external validation.<p>- The dashboard never has the &quot;right&quot; metrics - users will continue asking for changes. Be your best advocate and say no as a way of understanding the importance of the ask<p>- Related: always ask why about everything you&#x27;re building into or modifying in dashboards. Business users often ask for things without an ounce of rationale.<p>- Related: taking away is harder than not doing at all!<p>Finally, I think most dashboards miss one fundamental point. Imagine you&#x27;re the CEO&#x2F;COO and you&#x27;ve got this beautiful 3 or 4-chart dashboard in front of you. What should you know about what you&#x27;re seeing? What&#x27;s the succinct summary?<p>I like building in spots to write 2-3 sentence executive summaries.