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Tips on Designing a Million Dollar Dashboard

SeattleDataGuy on August 29, 2019

In the past few weeks, we have watched Tableau be purchased by Salesforce for 15.7 billion dollars and Looker for 2.7 billion dollars by Google. Wh...
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Alan Hylands

Great post. I'm hoping to see greater design practices evolving for dashboard creation as the tech (and business use of them) grows.

Too many times I've seen everything bar the kitchen sink (and sometimes the sink as well) being thrown at the one dashboard. All that leads to is information overload and the dashboard gets consigned to BI purgatory.

Keeping it simple and to the point is half of the battle but easier said than done when a committee room full of interested parties start chipping in with their demands.

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SeattleDataGuy

I have seen many a dashboard in BI purgatory. It is sad when you realize that there are hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on each of these dashboards that just overwhelm the end-user.

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Aditya M

You know what would be cool? If (cough) someone (cough I wish I could) build a real-time dashboard visualising the key metrics of the Roman Empire (as the leaders would’ve seen it) in a modern UI 😃 it combines my two favourite things: technology and geopolitical history!

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Aditya M

How would I even go about doing that..? I mean it would be nice to have a “roadmap” laid out for a junior data dev that I could follow... maybe a data science or BI book’s project can be repurposed - any suggestions?

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Alan Hylands

Start small. Have you got a data source to work from? Plan it like an actual business project where the Roman Emperor is your customer.

What would Julius Caesar have wanted to see on his weekly dashboard in terms of KPIs for the Empire? Then build that up one step at a time. Even start with something static in Excel to get a framework together and move it up to Power BI or Tableau when you have a clearer picture of what you want to be looking at.

Sounds like an interesting project, be sure to share it with us when you get started.

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Aditya M

It's quite intimidating and out-of-the-way in terms of what I'm doing with my career right now - but if I ever do, I certainly will :D thanks for the info!

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SeattleDataGuy

It would be cool to see! If you do happen to develop this you should share it on Tableau Public or in a blog post.

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Aditya M

That’s a great post @seattledataguy ! I always wondered about dashboards and BI and the idea finally “clicked” :)

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LuisPa

Amazing post! Thanks for sharing.