The meeting focused on best practices for turning exploratory dashboards into clear, explanatory communications for business audiences.
Two redesign approaches were demonstrated: a quick, focused overhaul, and a more robust executive summary format.
Key techniques included limiting color usage, highlighting focal points, and adding context through annotations and updated titles.
Action Items
(No specific action items or owners were identified in the transcript.)
Why Dashboards Do Not Always Tell a Story
Dashboards are primarily built for exploratory analysis, allowing users to drill down and interact with data to find insights.
When presenting insights to others, simply sharing dashboards (or screenshots thereof) is often ineffective; multiple graphs and lack of context make it difficult for audiences to identify key takeaways.
Dashboards lack narrative context, forcing audiences to make their own assumptions.
Transforming Dashboards to Explanatory Formats
Demonstrated the "where are your eyes drawn" test to identify issues with dashboard focus and clarity.
A quick redesign focused attention on one key chart by using color sparingly (highlighting only the main data series) and increasing chart size.
Adding context directly on the page—such as clarifying titles and annotations—helped explain the significance of visual elements.
Creating Standalone Explanatory Documents
When a dashboard needs to communicate insights without an analyst present, more context should be added, often necessitating an executive summary.
A side-by-side summary slide was recommended, with separate sections for retail and non-retail data.
The process included updating the slide title to reflect the main insight, adding explanatory text for context and suggested actions, and visual tweaks to ensure clarity and focus.
Annotations, data markers, and bolding were used to clarify key points and facilitate scanning.
Decisions
Focus on explanatory communication over raw dashboards — Dashboards are useful for analysis but generally not effective for communicating key insights without additional redesign and context.
Open Questions / Follow-Ups
Are there additional topics or dashboard examples for future makeover demonstrations?
Details and participation link for the "where are your eyes drawn" community challenge were shared for those interested.