What a dashboard is

Plan requirement

Subscription Suite Professional or higher, Explore Professional or higher
Access Agent

A dashboard is a set of reports for one audience. The audience is the design decision, not the reports.

What it is

Reports arranged on one or more tabs, with filters the reader can use. A report can appear on several dashboards, so the dashboard is an arrangement rather than a copy.

Build for one audience

A team lead wants their team's queue and times. A director wants volume, satisfaction and trend. Those are two dashboards, and merging them produces one that neither reads.

The question that settles most design arguments: who opens this, and what do they do next?

Lead with the answer

The top left is what people see. Put the one number that matters there, large, with its change against last period. Detail goes below.

Five to eight reports

Enough to tell a story, few enough to take in. Beyond that, use tabs, and if the tabs are for different people it should have been two dashboards.

Say what the numbers mean

A line of text saying what is included, which period, and when the data was refreshed. Without it, every reader forms their own assumption and two of them will disagree in a meeting.

Standard dashboards first

They cover most of what people ask for. Clone one and adjust rather than starting empty; you will get something better, faster.

A dashboard nobody opens should go

Check occasionally which are used. Unread dashboards are not harmless: they crowd the list and make the useful ones harder to find.

See also

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