5 Reasons Why Dashboards Don’t Work

We love data at our team, very much. We try to use whenever and wherever it is possible. But one of the controversial topics we always discuss internally is how much we dislike online dashboards.

Here are some things that we don’t like about traditional online dashboards

1. It typically takes 5–10 clicks to get to any data or metric you looking for. For example to find how many visitors this month came from Medium.com channel in Google Analytics following are the clicks I need to do a) sign-in; b) chose right account; c) open acquisition section; d) open source/medium report; e) click on medium.com traffic source; f) select right period.
2. You never know if you colleagues are actually looking into this dashboard. And slowly lack of peer pressures makes you less careful.
3. As time goes by, more and more data gets pushed to the dashboard. Eventually dashboard becomes complex and hard to read.
4. Typical dashboard or analytics tool provide you with too much choice. Ability to pick period, ability to chose between different reports, ability to filter data, ability to zoom in/out.
5. All this results in that you just stop going to dashboard. You start by checking that every hour, then you do this once per day, then once per week until you totally dismiss that.

What are your emotions about online dashboards?