#002: What is a Dashboard?

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:26.07 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Three analytics pros and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:01:36.83 [Michael Helbling]: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is episode two. I’m Michael Helbling, the Director of Analytics at Search Discovery here in Atlanta, Georgia. And I’m joined by my hosts, Tim Wilson, partner at Web Analytics Demystified. Hi, Tim. Hey, Michael. And also joined by Jim Kane, double CEO of Napkin and Babbage Systems. Hi, Jim. Hi, Michael. Jim and Tim, we’re here to discuss something that is controversial in our space. of being controversial is that everybody uses them and we’re talking about dashboards. So it’s strange, right? Something so fundamental to the practice of digital analytics could be thought of in so many different ways by so many different people, right? There’s a lot of utility and things like that. People say you can use dashboards to gather insights. And so let’s dig into this topic, right? You know, whatever happens, Hopefully someone will leave offended. All right. So let’s jump into it. Why don’t we start with you, Jim? Why don’t we get your definition of a dashboard?

00:02:15.92 [Jim Cain]: Well, that’s an interesting one. And as I was kind of doing some of my prep and research and talking with my team, it’s one of those weird words. It’s like, what is a dashboard? What does the color blue smell like? Like it’s one of those hyper vague. It means something specific in a different way to lots of different people. And we actually had two days of training a couple weeks ago with one of the gentlemen who works with Steven Fugh, who’s written some of the books on dashboards. And the first hour of the training session was like, who’s on first? Because he would say, a dashboard is this, and my staff would say, no, it’s not.

00:02:21.37 [Tim Wilson]: So clearly, your staff is wrong. So should we move on? There you go.

00:02:44.67 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, no one. Yeah, let’s move on then. Anyway, now that I’ve proven myself to know nothing, it’s interesting because the way that we look at a dashboard includes a lot of the key things that any dashboard would have. It’s at a glance. It’s highly relevant to the driver of the reporting. It’s accurate.

00:02:50.46 [Tim Wilson]: When you said the driver of the reporting, you mean the person who’s consuming it or the person who’s creating it?

00:03:42.37 [Jim Cain]: the consumer. So, you know, when you make a dashboard really relevant to somebody and they get it on, you know, Monday morning or every morning or whenever they require it, they get it at a glance view of kind of the heads-up display of the things that they care about. The training that we got from Steven Fugh’s organization, the emphasis was, that’s not a dashboard, that’s a report, so don’t call it a dashboard. And a dashboard, in their opinion, is something that is real-time. And a real-time dashboard means something very different. It supports very different kinds of decisions and information. So, you know, the vocabulary is extremely interesting. Like, I’m almost wondering if we’re going to move away from calling a lot of our kind of core assets dashboards and starting to call them corporate performance reporting.

00:05:23.74 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I think you’re, well, either I, because I’ve worshipped at the feet of Stephen Feu, and maybe I just then, I interpret what he says. I wouldn’t have said that anything, well, I think almost by definition, he’s not saying real time, because he works with, you know, Tableau and Excel, and shows things that are static. So, and again, in some of the prep, and maybe it’s worth, reading off. I don’t disagree with you on the at a glance or the relevant to the consumer. And I think you actually said performance. That’s to me the key word that when I say what is a dashboard for or what’s the dashboard good at, I always come back to it’s for performance measurement. It’s not, I mean, I think you and your interpretation of Steven Fugh as well as what Steven Fugh like literally says, You know, it all hinges on performance. It is not a everything to everybody, which is where I feel like marketers and some analysts and some technology vendors try to position it. Let me read Steven Fugh’s definition, or the definition from one of his favorite book of mine, which is information dashboard design. People’s understanding of what a dashboard is ranges widely. We need to make it clear to the dashboard’s future users that it provides a means to rapidly monitor performance. It is not a report that they’ll use to look up information from time to time. It is not a tool for exploring and analyzing data. It is an information display that will keep them aware of what’s going on in their specific realm of concern.

00:05:31.82 [Michael Helbling]: So that seems like to me that that would encompass more than just real time based on that description.

00:05:57.03 [Tim Wilson]: That’s what I think because I mean I think a weekly dashboard or even a monthly dashboard But the core part being that it’s, and I wonder if like the looking up information from time to time, that time to time, I don’t know if that’s where some of the, even the confusion around his language is falling, that it can be a reference point, but.

00:06:11.48 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, but usually the dashboard, let’s say you want to figure out what happened four and a half months ago, I don’t know that you jump to that dashboard. You probably jump to some other report in your ecosystem.

00:06:47.87 [Jim Cain]: The way it was described to us is that even though there’s a lot of commonality in terms of design and how you approach the consumption or the presentation layer of a piece of work, a dashboard is real time. A standardized report is like a dashboard, but it is not a real time delivery. And then an ad hoc report is a onesie. Ask a question, get an answer. And all three of them, when you do them right, have a lot of things in common. But they’re designed to support very different kinds of work.

00:07:45.62 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, but see, so this is the thing is, if I think about a real time report, I’m kind of shooting from the hip here, but that just screams data exploration, right? To me like I need to be able to look at that and kind of break things down and kind of figure out why right on the spot of what’s happening right this second. So if that’s all that a dashboard is I mean that directly comes in conflict with. what they defined it as in the book. So, I don’t know. Like, I’m not trying to disagree with Stephen Fu. Stephen Fu, if you ever listen to this, please understand how high regard we hold you in. But at the same time, like, I also want to say, like, well, how do we use dashboards, really? Like, the three of us. Is this how we use them? Because I’ll be honest with you, like, in this, in the frame of digital analytics, how often are we leveraging real-time data And do we see it being something super useful?

00:07:54.29 [Jim Cain]: See, it’s funny. That’s why I brought it up. And I certainly don’t want to pigeonhole the conversation around vocabulary. It’s interesting that if you were to pick up the phone and call someone.

00:08:00.01 [Michael Helbling]: This is a show about dashboards, so the conversation is getting pigeonholed.

00:08:45.99 [Jim Cain]: I don’t want to get totally cornered on the vocab, though. I work mostly with senior decision makers. When I talk to them about what a dashboard means, their description will be wildly different than if I’m talking to an email marketing manager or someone in the web operations group, like people who are more looking at either very hyper-focused or very real-time kind of reporting. So when I think dashboard, I think regularly provisioned against a schedule corporate performance reporting. And that’s how I do it. I actually think real-time dashboards once you go high up in an organization or just analysis paralysis. I’m not sure how someone would use them.

00:09:50.41 [Tim Wilson]: Well, but I think, so real time, we’re gonna hit like seven of my hot buttons. One, real time is, there’s sort of two reasons to have real time. One is I’m gonna sit there, I’m gonna watch the data constantly, minute in, minute out, act on it. And people act like they’re gonna do that and it just doesn’t happen. Real time from a, minimal latency. I don’t know if I’m going to look at this on a Monday or a Wednesday, but I don’t want to be stuck and pigeonholed that I’m only having data through Sunday. But the fact is, if you have a cadence going where you can say, I can only really act on a weekly cycle. So I’m going to look at this once a week, and I’m not going to obsess with it. But I think to your point of a senior level executive versus an email marketer versus a web operations, those are just different But the need to say at a glance, you know, relevant to the consumer. So the exact same thing still apply just at a different level or with a different scope or a different focus. Well, here’s the thing.

00:10:34.14 [Michael Helbling]: So let’s what I really want us to be able to deliver to folks listening is something specific that they can look at their organization or how they leverage dashboards or standardized reports if they need to redefine it that way. and say, I should consider this as one aspect. So I’ve heard some things that I think are key. One is considering the audience. We’ve talked around that. We’ve also mentioned cadence. So how often? So let’s dig into those two things a little bit. How often should a dashboard be produced for an executive, let’s say? Somebody who’s managing the entire digital or a major piece of it.

00:11:42.77 [Tim Wilson]: So my answer is that it should be produced at roughly the same cycle with which you’re able to react. And the reason is that if you don’t, say you’re producing it weekly, but it takes you, best case, two weeks to actually make a change that might impact anything on the dashboard. If you kind of line up, if you lay out the timelines and say, I looked on Monday and this was bad, And so I thought about it and dug into it for a week. And then on Friday, we made it, or the can’t make a change until two weeks later. Well, I’m still gonna get another view of the dashboard the next Monday. And I haven’t actually made any changes yet. So there’s this very real risk of you’re actually measuring at a greater frequency than you can impact a result. And you start heading down the path of Yeah, you know what? We’ve identified this as a problem because the dashboard says it is. It’s going to suck on the next dashboard and the dashboard after that.

00:12:48.93 [Jim Cain]: So maybe I’ll chip in along with the temporal piece by saying, I like weekly. So when we take a client under management, we require at least a weekly dashboard, depending again on the goals for corporate performance reporting. Sometimes we’ll also do a monthly and a quarterly. We have a customer that is currently doing twice daily and we won’t touch it because it’s analysis paralysis. It’s the Zed drive report. Everybody gets it. And they say, yeah, I read it. No one looks at it. And we have one customer who does daily reporting. This is a gigantic e-commerce company and they do like 70% of their revenue in like six weeks. We’re right in the middle of what they would call their holiday of the season capital capital S. Every single morning they look at that report. year over year and against corporate forecast. And the C-suite makes decisions on what levers in the business to pull. In that case, hyper relevant because like Tim said earlier, if it’s not actionable, it’s not worth it.

00:13:06.07 [Michael Helbling]: But then you also run into the situation where different aspects of your digital are actionable at different time frames. maybe I can’t change my website in a week, but I can certainly call up my search marketing agency and have them modify spend today, right?

00:15:16.12 [Tim Wilson]: Actionable dashboard is kind of another, like sets my, gets the hairs on the back of my neck standing up a little bit, because I think there’s an aspect, because when I’ll hear that, and there’s sort of two things I hear from, tends to be more marketers, analysts sometimes, times as well, because their pleasers is, you know, this dashboard needs to be actionable. And I’m like, well, it doesn’t. If the dashboard is actually showing you that you’re hitting your targets and your goals, then to me, it’s doing its job. And that’s fine. You may see it six times in a row, and you look at it and say, we don’t need to do anything. Then if you hit a point and you’ve got a KPI and it’s below forecast, below target, below something, there’s this I feel like naive expectation that the dashboard is going to tell you what to do. And it may be cases where you’re e-commerce and it’s a compressed six-week thing and you already have teed up because you have to act operationally, you know which levers you are going to need to pull. throw more into paid search, you know, push some promotion somewhere, swap out your homepage. You have to be prepped and ready to make those changes and already know that if this number slips, this is how we’re gonna react. The reality with most of the clients I work with, that’s not the case. They’re gonna see a problem and they’re gonna say, what do I do to fix it? And that dashboard is not going to answer that question. That question is gonna have to come from sitting down and saying, what might be causing the problem? This is, I am now in ad hoc analysis, or as I will say, to my grave, hypothesis validation land. And when the expectation is the dashboard is gonna tell them, this is down, and here’s what you need to do about it, I’ve never seen that actually be workable.

00:15:25.24 [Jim Cain]: We’re starting to move towards one of the places, Tim, where you and I, I mean, this is almost where the idea for these conversations came from was you and I button heads over what a dashboard is, you know?

00:15:49.54 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, no, I mean, I think I joined you in that because I think what I need to do about it probably exists in the head of the person because they bring in the rest of the context, right? Because they’re like, oh, this number is down. Let me just drop through the five things that happen in our business to drive that number. And I’m going to now go look up those five things and see how they interacted with this metric movement.

00:16:43.97 [Tim Wilson]: Well, but there’s a hope. There’s sometimes, I think marketers want that to be punted. They want to over scope what an analyst and what the data can do. I don’t think you can do that without really knowing the business. And I would even say that an analyst who knows the deeper an analyst knows the business, and I think we talked about this on the last episode when Jim was kind of going through the more senior analysts, the more they’re a marketer, the more they know the business, and they start to be equipped to maybe make recommendations. But generally, they’re still not as embedded in the strategy and the approach and the day-to-day. They didn’t get the update from the agency that that some feed, the product listing feed broke for three days. But I don’t know, so Jim, that’s, so so far, I feel like we’ve almost completely agreed on the dashboard stuff.

00:16:46.48 [Michael Helbling]: But Jim has already teed it up for us, here comes trouble.

00:17:42.70 [Jim Cain]: Yeah, I know, right? Here comes trouble. I mean, I think that there’s a difference between a standardized report and a dashboard, right? And so a lot of times, I’ll talk to someone and they’ll go, I need to see this and this and this and this, in this structure with this, you know, timeframe for refresh. And we’ll look at the numbers and it won’t be actionable. It’ll be what I call a report card. And the reason that people ask for report card reporting is for managing up. So if my boss doesn’t see these numbers and ideally they are all green, I’m going to get pulled into conference room B and my day is going to suck. So I need you to encapsulate the things that my boss cares about in a one pager. So I can put it in PowerPoint or just keep people off my back. And that’s a report card. I try and avoid those at all costs. And a dashboard, to me, is actionable. So maybe what I’ll do, and this is going to lead into the how many pages should be in a dashboard discussion, but you know.

00:17:47.26 [Michael Helbling]: That should not be a discussion. We all know it should be one page, right?

00:20:08.42 [Jim Cain]: There will be name calling. I’m just going to go more shadowing. When I build a dashboard or my team works as a stakeholder to build a dashboard, it’s basically got to have five things in terms of the output. It needs to be hyper relevant to that particular decision maker. And if we were to work with four VP’s of digital, all of whom do roughly the same thing, the executive summary page would have probably four different sets of KPIs. And they could be gross margin. They could be tied to corporate performance. But it needs to be hyper relevant Normally, we normally ask, how do you get paid your bonus? And that’s a pretty good place to start in terms of making it hyper relevant. Then the next two things that need to happen with a good dashboard is a combination of question removal and question creation. Because one of the things that we find when we’re doing analysis on behalf of a company is that we get asked lots and lots and lots of the same questions over and over. You know, how the email do or what’s going on with bounce rate. And if we can build something that, again, concisely at a glance and tied to performance removes 95% of the questions that would normally get asked to the analyst, we win with that standard report or that dashboard. And the other piece is question creation. And I find that a really good dashboard per what Tim was saying earlier, you know, it’s not going to say you had a bad sales day and it’s because you didn’t promote this particular product enough. But a good dashboard will allow a seasoned executive to go, I understand what’s happening. And now that I can see it all together, I have one or two really good questions that this dashboard informed. I couldn’t have them otherwise. And the last two elements of a good dashboard are about being able to manage down and manage up. So again, a great dashboard that brings things together and removes questions and helps you come up with new ones and lets you see performance against the way you get your bonus. is going to give you the ability to better understand and manage your vendors, better understand and manage your staff and your campaigns. And ideally, it’s also going to be when it’s that concise and that business relevant, something you can forward to your boss or your boss’s boss and have them go, oh, I get it. I know where your budget goes now.

00:20:13.79 [Tim Wilson]: So which of those am I supposed to disagree with?

00:20:16.98 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I’m struggling here as well.

00:20:27.85 [Jim Cain]: So in order to pull that off, there’s no executive summary, one page report in the world that’s going to pull that off. And really, maybe that’s the segue into the name calling.

00:22:20.86 [Tim Wilson]: Well, so let me, I will hedge a little bit and say that the one page is an ideal and one page forces some level of prioritization. Like if you lay that out and say, we’re going to stick to one page, And then somebody comes in and says, yeah, I like all that, but you know what, I still, I just want to see the top 20 pages on the site by these seven metrics. And that, I can’t, I can’t fit, or maybe these three metrics. I can’t fit 20, that’s going to blow my one page as it is. So, You’ll listen and you’ll hear me say it now, but it’s been said by hundreds of peoples that the dashboard should be different based on who the audience is, which your hyper-relevant says exactly that. Who is the primary audience for this dashboard? Okay, if the primary audience is this middle-level manager, then they don’t need all the emails that were sent last week and their open rate and click-through rate. That’s for the email person. I’m still like to be hyper relevant. If it can’t fit on a page, one page, if they get it at a glance and it’s what they need to know, I think answering the questions is where I do start to cheat. Sometimes they want to see by channel, or they want to see some other thing that’s not a KPI, and it may start to bleed over into a second page. But I still militantly go to that one page needs to be The KPIs, it’s going to tell me it’s hyper-relevant because it’s the numbers that I most care about. It’s what does impact my bonus. And it may generate questions because a KPI is moving in a bad direction.

00:23:30.68 [Jim Cain]: So we require kind of by law when we’re doing a build that once the KPIs have been defined, there needs to be one page of depth per KPI. in terms of kind of one degree of abstraction in terms of a higher level of detail. Again, a lot of times in retail, transactions or product revenue will be one of the KPIs that’s chosen for performance because that’s a given. And on that executive summary page, they’ll want to see, you know, what is the trending in the performance on revenue and how is that revenue comparing to our corporate forecast for the year. We will require one page underneath that and that’s really where you start to get interesting. We will not do two pages of depth. So we’ll never have a dashboard that has more pages in terms of secondary pages than there are KPIs on page one, right? So some customers in retail really care about gross margin. Like if you’re selling TVs and computers online, you’re making three points on a sale. Margin is very, very important. So the secondary page might be, you know, units per order and products broken down by gross margin.

00:25:58.00 [Tim Wilson]: So again, I honestly don’t think where, and maybe it purely comes down to semantics. So I have a allergic reaction to executive summary because it’s ambiguous as to whether or not it’s for the executives. And if we’ve said hyper-relevant, and this is a dashboard that’s going to the e-commerce team, the director of e-commerce or the manager of e-commerce who’s not necessarily an exec. To me, what you describe as your executive summary That is the dashboard. Now you just happen to package that dashboard with one finite level of drill down. And I absolutely have the exact same thing with clients where there’s one page and there is a drill down. But I always frame that drill down as being the place to start. It’s two things. It’s reference. Yeah, I just always want to see this list. or these other couple of metrics, but I agree, like it’s almost a compromise I can live with. We agree that it’s not a KPI, but you the business owner wants to have it, I will shove it on that second page in some way that makes organized sense. The second is, as a person getting the dashboard, I see something that has moved that is not where I want it to be. I don’t want to have nothing else. Just all I have is one fact that this KPI is not where I want it to be. I do want to be able to do kind of an initial quick drill down. And the better I understand my business, the more I understand, like if I’m really watching margin, then I know that if margin goes out of whack, I want to see my lowest margin products by volume. And I’m always going to want to have that on a supporting page. But that is actually, to me, supporting an ad hoc analysis. You’re just taking a guess at what data is most likely the first thing you’re going to want to look at. A channel breakdown, a product breakdown, a page breakdown. And you kind of package that up. But to me, that’s not part of the dashboard. It may be packaged in with the dashboard. It’s accessible from the dashboard. But it’s there for a first analysis of what’s causing the KPIs to move.

00:26:13.74 [Jim Cain]: But it’s standardized. It’s relevant. It’s tied to KPIs. It’s tied to performance. It’s just one level of detail underneath the primary KPI. So I think executive summary actually means Kohl’s notes of reporting.

00:26:14.86 [Tim Wilson]: Means what?

00:26:22.42 [Jim Cain]: It’s the Kohl’s notes of the reporting. It is the short version. So here are the three numbers I care about.

00:26:28.29 [Michael Helbling]: Here in the United States, those are the Cliff Notes. Cliff Notes? OK. Cole is his Canadian cousin.

00:26:30.91 [Jim Cain]: He’s from New Brunswick. Cliff and Cole.

00:26:34.69 [Michael Helbling]: I think they were on Cheers together, maybe.

00:27:15.70 [Jim Cain]: So then the Cliff Notes is the executive summary page. And you’re going to look at that page, and you’re going to go, because again, I’m a senior decision maker. Visits, good. We nailed it. We hit my number. Transactions, we’re light. How come? You drill into the relevant to you detailed page, and that allows you to remove, like again, a hypothesis creation, go, not that, not that. Now I need my analyst to do bleh, and ask you a very hyper-specific question that’s very actionable. So for those of you just tuning in, I am about a minute away from getting Tim Wilson to agree that a dashboard should have multiple pages. Tim, your response.

00:27:38.94 [Michael Helbling]: So I’m going to break in there. I’m going to save Tim from having to change horses on that. We’ve talked a lot about KPI, and very quickly, I’d like us to define that for our audience. Just so that as we’ve talked about it, we can just make sure that we are communicating that across. And I’ll just assume agreement. Why don’t you take that one, Tim?

00:28:47.02 [Tim Wilson]: So here’s where I am. And again, all of these things, I start with kind of a purist, and I try to march to the purist as far as I can and then know that I have to kind of shade it. But to me, KPIs, they kind of, they hinge off of the two magic questions. Credit to Matt Cohen, who’s the guy who taught me these. You start with, what are we trying to achieve? And it depends on, it doesn’t matter where you are in the organization, it’s what are you trying to achieve? What are you the site owner? What are you the digital marketing executive? Call that your goal, your objective, whatever you want to call it. the KPIs are exactly how are we going to know if we’re achieving that. And that means, from a practical perspective, that means two to five measures with targets set that tie to that, are we going to achieve, and that’s it. There are tons of other metrics that are useful and interesting and are related to those, but it’s nothing more than nothing less than that.

00:29:20.03 [Jim Cain]: I think the single hardest question that I ask when we’re doing dashboard design is what is winning, which is similar to what are we trying to achieve. I have to ask a lot of sneaky questions for KPI definition, but basically what are the heartbeat metrics that actually really, really matter that everything else is tied to, you know, because, I mean, you got petabytes of data, but they should all roll up into two or three what winning looks like. And it’s deceptively simple and it’s really hard to kind of get the right ones in place.

00:31:28.77 [Tim Wilson]: But if you define those, the KPIs is that. And so then I’ll go to your other, you’re managing down and managing up. To me, if you’ve got your KPIs well, From a managing up, they’re clear and intuitive, and it’s a handful that you can always go to your manager and say, these are the four things that I’m trying. That’s the opening to your conversation about data. Or if they ask how things are going, it’s that set of KPIs, because they’re clear enough. They’re not way down in the weeds. At the same time, managing down, you go to your team, the people who work for you, and you say, this is what we’re trying to deliver. It fits in that hyper-relevant mode, but it’s a very, very finite list. And I think, and we joked about it last time, and it drives us all nuts. It drives me nuts when somebody says, I mean, actually, I predict there’s a 40% chance that I will die from an aneurysm when somebody says the word key KPI to me. And I’m a consultant. I hope that doesn’t happen when I’m on a client call, but I definitely die a little bit. And there are people in the industry who say the same thing. And it’s like, you listen to yourself. That is utterly moronic. Like in, in, in KPI indicators. They want to, they want to say every, every metric that I might want to look at, or that is of interest. And I might want to look at on a regular basis. Therefore it’s important. Therefore it’s key. And I’ve heard people actually say, well, you have KPIs and you have PIs. And I’m not sure I really like that. I like that either. But once people start saying, our KPIs looking at is visits by channel. And I’m like, no, like you’re a channel breakdown. Maybe for somebody in the email channel, a KPI is conversions for email. If you want to slice the KPI by channel, that’s fine. But your KPI is not visits by channel or conversions by channel. It’s wrong.

00:32:46.97 [Jim Cain]: This goes back to one of the things we were talking about last time around requirement solicitation. And there are tricks to figure out what someone’s KPIs are. For example, again, what is winning? How do you get paid your bonus? I like asking if you got stuck in the elevator with the CEO for 30 seconds and he said, hey, I know you. How’s it going? And you had 30 seconds. What would you talk about? Let’s take the verbs and the nouns. There might be a KPI in there. Again, KPI is just a really industry-specific way to say what does winning look like. We were doing dashboard design about a year ago for a large electronics company. and the VP of e-commerce loved all of my ideas. What if we look at cost of sale? Love it. Put it on the front page. What if we look at this kind of performance, channel performance, or lifetime value? Everything I said is wicked. Let’s put it on the front page. So basically, it turned into, can you replicate Omniture in Excel for me? So finally, I said, the CEO of your company is very famous. Does he ever walk by your office? And he said, oh yeah, if the CEO ever comes near my office, I know that someone’s about to get yelled at. And I said, OK, well, What are you scared about getting yelled at for digital? And he said, oh, that’s easy. This, this, and this. Great. There. There’s our front page.

00:32:55.89 [Michael Helbling]: And so now, Jim, you understand why Tim wants to frame dashboards as something that needs to fit into one page.

00:32:57.56 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah.

00:33:40.12 [Michael Helbling]: oh wow there we did it all right now on that let’s get some wrap up I think you know we didn’t even cover everything that we planned to cover this episode but we’re getting down to the wire here and I really want to come back around kind of have you to really think about the conversation we just had and maybe deliver kind of a Here’s the three things, or here’s the thing that’s key as an organization. I feel like this is, if you can do this well, this will do more to drive your analytics sophistication than almost any other activity you can do in an organization. But why don’t I have Jim, why don’t I start with you?

00:34:58.57 [Jim Cain]: Well, I’ll just start. I hadn’t thought about it that way, Michael, but if you can get a good dashboard in front of somebody, then you have mastered requirement solicitation, data cleanliness, deployment management, advanced Excel. See, you’re dead right. If you’re at the point where you’re putting good dashboards in front of stakeholders, you’re doing all right. I think the big takeaways for me is that a good dashboard, again, needs to be hyper relevant to the consumer of the report. I think that it needs to be something that’s designed to remove simple questions, but allow for the creation of sophisticated questions that are relevant to that stakeholder. And I think, and we didn’t touch on this today, but I actually think a good dashboard is a living document. So, you know, if it becomes something that’s set it and forget it, and we can’t change a single thing on it, given the evolution, like I have kids older than Twitter, you know what I mean? If I had a dashboard that was six years old, or seven years old, social wouldn’t have the prominence it might need to have. So a dashboard needs to be a living, breathing thing in order to remain relevant and provide that kind of decision support. I think those would be my big takeaways. Also, multiple pages.

00:36:04.78 [Tim Wilson]: So my rap will start off by saying, Jim, you ignorant slut. One page. Actually, that last part of the living, I am hoping you qualify that a little bit. I agree that they need to change, but I also think they need to evolve with extreme deliberation and prejudice that the dashboard or call it the first page of your dashboard or what I would call a dashboard. Those, what the business is trying to do should not be shifting that much. So when I see evolution, it’s a little bit more of what’s the other kind of supporting stuff that we thought might be useful, that we kind of get tacked into it. And it’s only when we say, yes, we have shifted what we’re trying to achieve that will say, yes, we’re introducing a new KPI. But I agree that happens. You think you’ve got four KPIs and you realize that one of them is totally secondary and you want to pull that off, but something else is something you always go to look at. So I’ll agree on that.

00:36:15.05 [Jim Cain]: But I agree with you, by the way. The executive summary or the dashboard page, as you would call it, that’s something you don’t tinker with too much.

00:37:43.62 [Tim Wilson]: So my quick ones, I think, I mean, I really like some of the lists Jim had. So the one thing, so I think the hyper relevant, I think it’s a great word to use, and I think that you get the hyper relevance by being really clear on your audiences. And so I find myself doing that and planning when somebody says, we want you to do a dashboard, and I’m like, okay, let’s talk about who’s getting it. And if you start saying it’s for IT, and it’s for sales, and it’s for marketing, then it can’t be hyper relevant to all of those. Part of that early kind of requirements gathering step is who is the dashboard for, and it’s better to have multiple dashboards for different audiences. And not everybody gets the same six dashboards because then you’ve just cheated on the one page. The second thing for me would be being really, really clear that you’re just measuring performance. That first page is really around, are we delivering what we expected to deliver? And then the thing that we didn’t really touch on at all, but I think all three of us, although we started off with Steven Few, is actually designing it really, really well. It’s not just barfing the KPIs onto a page and forcing them to fit. applying some level of structure and organization and data visualization best practices. Otherwise, that whole at a glance goal, it’s going to be undermined. It could be one page and you can’t read it at a glance if it’s not actually really, really well, well-designed.

00:37:53.41 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, great takeaways. I think my takeaway is that there’s almost no time when a pie chart is acceptable on a dashboard.

00:37:57.05 [Tim Wilson]: I disagree, there’s no time for the pie chart.

00:38:34.75 [Michael Helbling]: Oh well, okay, there you go. So there’s fireworks, folks. So yeah, I think Like you said, we started off talking about Steven Fugh and the definition, but yeah, there’s actually a few topical areas we didn’t get to cover. And so, you know, a little inside baseball for the listener, we actually had all these topics kind of fleshed out and we tried to cover it in one show. It looks like our attempt to do that is futile. So we will cover dashboards again at a future date. I’m almost positive. Well, I want to thank you guys, Jim and Tim. for this conversation, I think it’s very useful.

00:38:44.79 [Tim Wilson]: I do feel like Jim and I kind of came together a little bit today that maybe we’re not as, when we sit down and talk about it, maybe we’re not as far apart as we thought.

00:39:00.45 [Jim Cain]: I have a tremendous amount of respect for anybody who’s able to just sit up straight and own it and say, I was wrong and Jim was right. And I just have a tremendous amount of respect for that. And I’ll send you some cold notes to look over on.

00:39:13.28 [Michael Helbling]: You know we have a Facebook page and we’d love to hear your comments and questions, other topics you’d like to see us cover. Alright, and this is the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Cheers. See you next time.

00:39:19.47 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions. Facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at @analyticshour on Twitter.

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