A Dashboard for Somebody Who Hates Dashboards

Why most dashboards go unread

A typical dashboard has twenty panels, several charts, and a set of figures whose definitions nobody could state.

It exists to demonstrate that measurement is taking place rather than to answer anything, and the person it was built for opens it twice and then stops.

That is not a failure of discipline. Twenty numbers with no hierarchy is genuinely unreadable, and a reader with no way to tell which matters will reasonably conclude that none does.

The useful version is smaller than anybody expects: five numbers, one page, two minutes.

The five

• Enquiries this month, and last month.
• Where they came from, in three lines.
• Visitors, as one figure with last year beside it.
• The page that produced the most enquiries.
• Cost per enquiry, if you spend anything.

Between them those answer whether the month was good, why, and what to do more of. Everything else is detail that can be looked up when a question arises.

Enquiries go first

Because it is the only figure that describes the business rather than the website.

Putting it at the top establishes what the page is about, and it means a reader who stops after one line has read the important one.

It also anchors everything below it: a month with more visitors and fewer enquiries is a different story from one with both up, and the order makes that comparison automatic.

Count it yourself rather than taking it from analytics, since your own record includes the calls, the walk-ins, and anybody who replied to an email.

A number you counted is also one you can defend, which matters when somebody questions it.

One page, no scrolling

The constraint that does most of the work.

If it does not fit on a screen without scrolling, something has to go, and the discipline of choosing is what makes the result readable.

No page two, no appendix, and no supporting charts, all of which are places for things nobody reads to accumulate.

Where somebody genuinely needs more detail, the answer is a conversation or a separate document produced on request, not a permanent extra section.

A page that fits on a screen gets read on a phone, which is where most people will actually look at it.

Write a sentence, not a chart

The addition that turns figures into something useful.

Underneath the five numbers, one or two sentences saying what you think happened and what you are doing about it.

Enquiries down slightly, the quiet period we expected, no action. Or, the new service page produced four enquiries in its first month, so we are writing two more like it.

That sentence is what somebody will remember, and it is the part a chart cannot supply.

It also forces the person producing the report to have a view, which is a useful discipline and the thing most reporting avoids.

A worked example

A business had a dashboard with eighteen panels, produced automatically, which the owner had not opened in five months.

Asked what he wanted to know, he said whether the phone was ringing more than last year and what was making it ring.

They replaced it with a single page: enquiries this month and last, the three main sources, visitors against the same month last year, the best-performing page, and two sentences.

He read it every month thereafter, on his phone, usually within a day of it arriving.

The eighteen panels had contained everything on the new page and had made none of it findable.

The change was not what was measured. It was what was presented.

Keep it stable

The property that makes it valuable over time.

Use the same five figures, in the same order, with the same definitions, every month.

The value of a monthly report is comparison, and comparison requires nothing to change between editions.

Resist adding a sixth number when something interesting appears, since that is what turns five into eighteen over two years.

Where something new genuinely deserves ongoing attention, remove something to make room, which forces the judgement rather than deferring it.

And keep the previous editions, so a year of them can be read in sequence.

Produce it by hand

A suggestion that runs against the instinct to automate.

Five numbers take about ten minutes to gather manually, and gathering them yourself means you look at them.

An automated report arrives, is not opened, and is trusted without anybody noticing when a figure becomes wrong.

A person assembling five figures notices when one looks odd, which is exactly the moment a tracking fault gets caught.

Automate later if the ten minutes becomes a burden, and accept that the attention was part of the value.

For most small businesses this is a monthly habit rather than a system.

Send it, do not host it

A small distinction that decides whether it is read.

A page somebody has to log in and navigate to is a page they visit when they remember, which is rarely.

The same five numbers sent as a short message, on a fixed date each month, arrive whether or not anybody was thinking about it.

Put the numbers in the message itself rather than attaching a file or linking to a report, since each extra step loses readers.

The test is whether it can be read on a phone without opening anything, and if it can, it will be.

The counter-case

Five numbers is not right for every situation.

A business spending substantially on advertising needs more detail and needs it more often, since a campaign going wrong for a month is money rather than a data point.

A shop with daily transactions has genuinely more to watch, and an operations dashboard is a different thing from a monthly summary.

There is also a risk in oversimplifying for somebody who would engage with more, since not everybody who dislikes dashboards dislikes detail.

Ask what they want to know before deciding what to include, and let the answer determine the page rather than the format.

Building it

1. Ask what they actually want to know.
2. Put enquiries first.
3. Count enquiries yourself.
4. Fit it on one screen.
5. Add two sentences of interpretation.
6. Keep the same five, in the same order.
7. Assemble it by hand for the first year.

Step five is what makes it worth producing, since the figures are available anywhere and the view about them is not.

A format that satisfies an outside reader is covered in a report your accountant would accept.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.