Why Every Dashboard Cannot be Called a Dashboard
If you are using a dashboard to tailor strategies and yet struggling to make headways in the market, you have a real problem in hands. A possible reason for your struggle is that you have relied too heavily on the summary of recommended actions and followed them to a T, without quite realizing that your competitor too might be following the same set of recommendations. Yet another reason might be the inability of your dashboard to analyze data in keeping with your business goals. So where did you actually go wrong? It’s in believing your dashboard to be a dashboard.
Not every dashboard can be called a dashboard because most dashboards fail heavily in leveraging visualization to present a solution. This makes it impossible for managers to take smart and insightful decisions. Your dashboard is not a dashboard if it is unable to drill-around the data to capture interesting points and explain your performance on the basis of these points.
An effective dashboard will not repeat what the data already reflects. Instead, it will analyze aberrations in the graphs behavior and recommend corrective actions like “Most of our mobile visitors abandon us because we don’t have a responsive website”. At the same time it will let know the possible impact of the solution like “Making our site responsive can increase our traffic by 75% and conversion rates by 38%”.
SmartCoders offers you a perfect blend of design, engineering, and analytics to deliver insightful dashboards to steer your data-centric decisions. We build dashboards keeping the user in mind because we believe a dashboard can be effective only if it happens to target a single type of user. For instance, when developing dashboards for the decision-making level we present an aggregate overview of performance indexed against an agreed KPI, with proper segmentation of data in charts and tables, and trended over time.
Again, those in the site optimization team may just require summary of performance and can well do without insights as they can drill down and find insights for themselves. For these lot, we make sure the dashboard is intuitive and clear enough to give them what they want. In other words we guarantee quality insights by developing dashboards that are relevant to the audience. Furthermore, we take great care to de-clutter displays so that the focus is not lost. We determine the number of data inputs based on our understanding of what is important. But when it comes to KPIs we sit with our clients to understand their requirements.
If your business dashboard has failed you, then it’s time you upgrade to a smart dashboard platform and make the most of using dashboards.