Three Common Mistakes With Company-level Dashboards

Company-level dashboards are special. They hold the most important Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across each department and business area.

Everyone in organization gravitates to the company-level dashboard, from the CEO to the newest team member. This makes them a focusing tool as much as a reporting tool. And, therefore, need a lot of care.

In this short article, I’ve outlined three common mistakes with company-level dashboards.

1. No Consistent Design Aesthetic

Company dashboards should be the gold standard in data visualization for the organization. That means: standardized charts, consistent colors palette and a well-structured layout.

However, this is rarely implemented. Often, I find each department has a very different look and feel to their dashboard — laddering up to an inconsistent company-level dashboard.

This is often due to different analysts contributing, in their own way, to the dashboard and no overarching team/person focused on the user experience.

Inconsistent design means the user has to work harder to extract the information they need. Leading to confusion and misread data.

A well-designed company-level dashboard has a consistent look and feel across all the charts. Axes, for example, are standardized both in scale and number format. Charts are aligned in a consistent grid pattern. Filter buttons are in the same spot for each dashboard and each chart. Titles and descriptions are consistent both in location and font type. Colors are standardized from the same palette, allowing a user to move from one chart to the next with ease.

2. Too Much Complexity

Just last week, I saw a company-level dashboard that presented 24 different metrics to the user. The user also had the option to toggle by raw numbers or ratios, effectively given them 48 different metrics to digest. This amount of information was creating confusion.

Too much complexity on a dashboard can paralyze the viewer and lead the user to either completely disregard the information or simply focus on familiar metrics. Research tells us that managers have a bias towards familiar metrics and data when making business decisions.

Company-level dashboards need to be designed so that only critical KPIs are displayed. The deep-dives and complex analyses should not be on company-level dashboards. Instead, they should live in department or project-level dashboards only.

The best company-level dashboards I’ve seen have a single top-level dashboard with the uber KPIs like Revenue or New User growth, alongside one dashboard per department showing their top 6 (or less) KPIs.

As mentioned, company-level dashboards are a focusing tool as much as a reporting instrument and so a lot of effort should be given to keeping them as simple as possible.

3. Optimizing the User Experience for All Formats

The pace of decision making gets faster every day and the expectation is that information is available to business leaders as they need it, on all their devices.

However, I see very few dashboards that are optimized for mobile. Instead, we’re still expecting users to access data from a desktop. This may be fine for some but I rarely see senior leaders sitting down at a desk. They’re often running from meeting to meeting, carrying little more than an iPad or their phones.

In order to meet the needs of data users, company-level dashboards need to be available to all users — which means on all devices; mobile, desktop or iPad.

I’ve been caught out in a few meetings with senior leaders who have their iPad’s and want to see some data but can’t see the dashboard properly. It’s a lesson I learned early and taught me to ensure every new dashboard I build is mobile-friendly.

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Company-level dashboards set the standard for the organization on what data visualization should look like. If they’re poorly designed, it paves the way for other dashboards and reports to be poorly designed as well, increasing the chance that data will be mis-read or worse, not used at all.

However, a well designed company-level dashboard can set the stage for crisp, clear reporting. It helps users by providing a simple, easily digestible set of KPIs that can help departments focus and align on common goals. It can also elevate data visualization across the organization by setting the standard for what is expected. Clean and clear reporting is important for both the user experience and encouraging users to use data properly in decision making.