On April 9, 2020, I published an essay called “Dashboards are Dead”. I wrote it mainly to vent my pent-up frustrations as a data analyst, and yes, also to take on the most popular data tool at the time: the dashboard.
To my surprise, a lot of people read it. Over 60,000 people in the first weekend alone, and over 250,000 as of writing this. Something in the now-infamous article clearly resonated with others (or just really pissed them off). Over the last three years, I’ve attempted to write various follow-up articles but have shied away at the last moment, not sure exactly what I wanted to say.
This weekend marks three years since that article, and by now I might have just enough distance to see things clearly — both where the industry was then, and how far we’ve come.
Photo by Sonja Langford on Unsplash
Dashboards aren’t dead
Don’t worry, I see the elephant in the corner.
Of course, dashboards aren’t actually dead. For the record, that wasn’t what I was suggesting.
The point I was trying to make is that dashboards have always been good for one thing: quickly displaying numbers. But we’ve been misusing them by expecting them to do everything for us. We’ve asked them to tell stories, be visually appealing, convey information quickly, act as a data portal, and do anything else we could think of. Of course, they couldn’t do all of that.