What makes an executive dashboard worth opening

Start from the decision

A dashboard earns its place by changing what someone does. Before choosing a chart, write down the decision the reader makes and how often they make it. Everything on the page should serve that.

Five habits of dashboards people use

• One question per view. If a page answers six questions, it answers none quickly.
• The most important number is the largest thing on the screen, with its comparison beside it.
• Definitions are shared. Revenue means the same on every page because it is defined once.
• It is current without anyone's effort, because a pipeline feeds it on a schedule.
• A reader can get from the summary to the detail behind it without asking an analyst.

Why trust is a data problem, not a design problem

Executives stop opening a dashboard the first time it disagrees with another one. That disagreement is almost never caused by the chart. It comes from preparation done differently in two places.

The most effective improvement to a dashboard is often invisible: putting its preparation in the same environment as its presentation, so the path from source to figure can be followed.

A dashboard is a draft of an action

The best outcome of a dashboard is that someone does something. If the next step always happens in another system, consider whether the dashboard should be connected to it — a forecast that explains itself, or a workflow that starts when a threshold is crossed.