When working in data science, paneling often feels like a disadvantaged but inevitable work. Why are you disadvantaged? Dashboarding is less technical (less sophisticated) than analysis and modeling, and more repetitive. But why is it also inevitable? It is the first essential step to understand any product, opening the door to analysis and modeling. It even helps build trust with stakeholders, as the dashboard is often among the first requests from stakeholders.
Meanwhile, the difficulty of the control panel is also usually underrated. I have seen numerous dashboards created by colleagues over the past seven years. Surprisingly, not everyone does this “easy task” well. You might be wondering: isn't the dashboard just about creating a bunch of charts? Well, yes and no. To create a good dashboard, you need to logically organize each visualization and simplify complex data for your audience. It's more about data-driven decision making. Additionally, a good dashboard can always enable self-service analytics and reduce tedious data extraction requests, which in turn benefits the data team.
In this article, I'll share my top five tips for designing effective business dashboards that deliver clarity, actionable insights, and lasting value. These tips apply to any dashboard tool you use, whether it's Tableau, Looker, PowerBI…
