Conquering Dashboard Fatigue

With so much reliance on dashboards, by so many people, with so many different needs – often poorly curated dashboards cause more problems than they solve – all contributing to dashboard fatigue.

Time and Effort

The time we spend looking at dashboards and analyzing data is rising – stealing a sizable chunk of the working week. McKinsey says that employees spend almost 8 hours a week on average searching and gathering information. An IDC study reveals that: “data professionals are losing 50% of their time searching, preparing, and governing data, including duplicate work.”

It takes time to build and maintain dashboards, with owners handling multiple requests for multiple dashboards from multiple directions. Not to mention the constant adjustments, bridging of knowledge gaps, and trying to assimilate the right data for the right stakeholders while endeavoring to appease everyone simultaneously.

Passive and Poor Usage

It’s happened to us all. You’re sitting staring at your screen, and you have no idea what you’re looking at and what you should do with the information presented.

Dashboards are valuable if you speak the language, but not everyone does. For all the data analysts and power users who fully or somewhat understand the story a dashboard is trying to tell, there other user groups who derive little-to-no value. Either because of a lack of understanding or the data has no relevance to them.

Frustration

There can be numerous layers of frustration with dashboards. Firstly, they can be expensive to build or purchase, and laborious to maintain – which can cause resentment or buyer’s remorse if the utility is low.

Then there are the business leaders and stakeholders, who are frustrated that they are not getting what they want from dashboards. In turn, they amplify their frustrations to the data teams or software providers, who may not be able to support their needs or accommodate endless customizability.

This can lead to a please-all mentality for dashboard creators, not fully understanding what different stakeholders want – thus adding extra layers of complexity.

Overcomplicated and Irrelevant Dashboards

Dashboards are built by technical minds, incorporating what they think is valuable to the end-user. Even if there’s a beautiful coat of paint over a simple UI, there can be a zillion filters waiting to derail your user experience, leaving you cross-eyed and unsatisfied.

With these so-called self-service solutions comes another pain point that repeatedly occurs – creating end-user products that are not actionable and displaying information that doesn’t lead to action.

Users simply stop using dashboards when they realize no action can be determined from the displayed data. Those skilled enough to extract some value – but not the insights they need – generally export the information anyway and turn to excel and multiple reports to make conclusions. Replacing one fatigue with another.

Employees also turn to spreadsheets when they don’t trust the quality of data presented to them, with 62% of organizations not confident with their own customer insights data.

Dashboards are great for informing you what you already know and how you got here – but they are not designed for data discovery and to help you make sense of where you want to go next.

A major problem is the inability to make conclusions:

• Why can’t I find what I’m looking for?
• Is the information relevant to me?
• Have I misinterpreted the data?
• Why are the numbers what they are?
• How can I use this data to take action?

Standard dashboards don’t link to actions, So if action steps are not built into the way data is delivered, how can dashboards tell the whole story? This is why users take data from non-narrative dashboards, play with it, and present their own story in a presentation.

Think how better it would be if dashboards went beyond reporting information and told actionable stories instead.