I continue my series on dashboard visualization:
Before you build a dashboard, you have to know your audience. If you don’t know who your viewers will be and where their interests lie, you run the risk of building a dashboard which fails to serve their needs. When that happens, people stop looking at your dashboard. In order to increase the likelihood that your dashboard will be useful, I have a few critical questions:
- Who is your intended audience?
- How will your intended audience use your dashboard?
- What actions do you want them to take as a result of what they see?
- Are you showing the right measures in the right way?
- What cultural differences might matter?
The rest of this post will drill into each of these concepts.
These are the types of questions which can make the difference between a dashboard people love and a dashboard people never use.