Change Your Approach to Dashboard Adoption: 4 Tips

By: Catherine Augustyn and Nicole (Hamilton) Egan

Picture this: You’ve spent countless hours conducting user interviews, designing wireframes, analyzing and preparing data, and developing an insightful dashboard. You know that the employees at your organization waste hours manually exporting their data to analyze in Excel spreadsheets and you’ve created a tool that will provide them with “need to know data” at their fingertips to enable faster data driven decision making.

You’re thrilled when an email goes out to the organization announcing this new tool. But days, weeks, and months go by and you haven’t heard anything. You notice that your colleagues are sticking to their manual Excel routine. But why? You built a tool to make their lives easier!

It’s something that we see all too often with the implementation of Visual Analytics. Organizations seeking to become more data driven spend months, sometimes even a year, developing a solution that they know will both benefit employees and improve the bottom line. The problem is, without the proper adoption levers in place early in the development process, the tool likely won’t be used.

So how do we fix this? What can be done differently to drive adoption and sustain it? Slalom Boston’s Organizational Effectiveness team brings you these tested principles and tools to tackle the key components to effective data visualization change management:

Tip 1. Engage Your People Early

• Identify your influencers | No, not on Instagram. Think about the leaders or the end users in your organization that employees value. Identify them early and educate them on the work that is underway. Once you’ve gained their buy-in, help them champion and promote the dashboard pre-launch by demoing the tool at a Quarterly meeting or during a daily stand-up. Demo specific use cases to demonstrate how the tool can be used to quickly answer business questions. If you have the right people behind your work who can effectively use the tool, you’ll drive adoption faster.
• Gain insight via focus groups |Test how your visuals are coming together with employees who aren’t involved in the day-to-day development. You can probe them to determine: 1. Does it make sense to them? You may learn that some elements of the visualization are not intuitive. This will prompt developers to take a step back and make modifications to the visuals to ensure they’re more user friendly. 2. Do they have questions? Understanding blind spots can help you to understand what information should be front and center in communications and learning materials.

Tip 2. Invest in Impactful Communication

• Make a splash pre-launch |Think outside of a typical email memo. Does your company have a notable external brand? Leverage it! Develop communications that have strong taglines and fun visuals to catch employees’ eye.
• Sustain the momentum | More often than not, after the initial launch of a tool, employees don’t hear about it again. Develop a communication strategy that keeps this tool top of mind for employees and accounts for follow up communications months after the initial launch. Leverage the metrics you gather to inform who should be targeted and when.
• Lead with the WIIFM (“What’s In It For Me?”) | It’s important to hook employees from the start. They receive hundreds of emails each week. What is going to make the launch of a new data visualization tool interesting to them? Create headlines that capture their attention and state their direct impact (e.g. “Want to save up to 5 hours a week updating your data Excel sheets? We’ve got you covered!”).

Tip 3. Customize Learning

• Remember, one size doesn’t fit all | While a quick reference guide may suffice for one employee, it may not for another. Think through multiple channels to reach your audiences. Whether it’s live sessions, recorded videos, reference materials or personalized coaches, meet your employees where they are, and work with them to make learning a priority.
• Think beyond functionality | It’s great for your users to understand how to filter, access a tool tip, and favorite a page, but it’s just as important (if not more so) for them to understand how to read the data visualization and use it to answer important business questions.
• Incorporate gamification | Who said bribery doesn’t work? All jokes aside, gamification has proven to be a valuable tool in driving learning participation and tool adoption. Think through ways to incorporate this into your learning strategy. This could be as simple as a raffle for completing a learning module or as fun as a scavenger hunt.

Tip 4. Measure Your Impact

• Measure, measure, measure | When all other change levers are in place, how do you know if they’ve made an impact? Evaluate users’ hits on pages, develop heat maps of clicks, launch surveys, and more! If you are using Tableau as your data visualization tool, leverage Tableau Server’s PostgreSQL database direct connection to develop dashboards to analyze usage. Join this usage information with your company’s information to understand gaps in your platform and strategy across the business. For example, combine campaign engagement data with workbook views by department to understand how effective your communications are and where in the organization influencers should focus.

We understand, people are programmed to resist change. If you leverage even just a few of the tips and tricks outlined above and focus on engagement, communications, customized learning and measurement, you can impact the adoption of your new data visualization tool.