There's dashboards all around us that are USED

And they look nothing like the ones I make...

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The very much beat up $40 perpetual calendar watch I used to date my work files from 2008 to probably 2013

For reasons I don’t fully understand, I was looking at watches briefly this weekend through the power of internet window shopping. I’ve always had a watch on my wrist when I go outside since my teens, so getting older and finally having pocket money automatically turned it into a small hobby. Luckily for my wallet, I also know that I carelessly slam my arm into things all the time, so all the watches I own are relatively inexpensive pieces and I probably won’t consider anything past even $500, which is nothing in a watch collector’s view of the world .

So one not-as-popular feature I was looking at this cycle was the “Perpetual calendar”. It’s a feature of watches that show a numeric date that (typically) knows about leap years until the year 2100. Otherwise, every February, (and sometimes every 1st of the month) you have to adjust the date display. As you can imagine, there’s big jumps in complexity going from a simple geared wheel that displays 31 numbers, once a day, to something that knows how to correctly handle the 30/31 days of the year (annual calendar), to handling leap years for the next ~80 years (perpetual calendar).

In cheaper watches, this could be handled via microchip controlling a digital or analog display. One that I used in most of my 20s cost me all of $40. But it’s possible to create all these calendar features using purely mechanical components, if you’re willing to spend large amounts of money for them.

The main reason I was looking for this feature again was because there was a time where having it was extremely useful. I habitually date my files (even in google drive) so that I can find things over time, and the period where I was a front line data analyst saw me making a large number of files every day. I would use my watch to quickly check the date whenever I forgot it (which was pretty often), despite having the date in the corner of my computer screen at the time. It was very useful to have just this one reliable, easy to read, place where I knew I could get correct information I needed quickly.

Wait, where have I heard that before?

Was I wearing… a DASHBOARD… on my wrist for years?

And I had been USING it, daily?!?!?

Dashboards that are actually USED

So if you think of my watch as a dashboard, and consider the LED weather display I hacked together recently, these things were probably used more in the past handful of days than many of the dashboards I’ve created at work have ever been used. The contrast is stark.

There’s a billion blog posts, articles, and probably research papers (I haven’t bothered to check), about what it takes to write good dashboards. You know, generic things like “make sure it’s relevant” or “keep them short and actionable”. There’s also plenty of advice out there that the jobs of data scientists (and analysts, and quant UX researchers, etc.) is to NOT only be making dashboards. I don’t think it’s interesting to rehash well-rehearsed content that already exists.

But probably the thing that is missing from all the discussion about whether dashboards are good, useless, whatever, is that these dashboards are being used because… they were fulfilling an immediate need. More specifically, these dashboards only exist because I had bothered to go through the toil of constantly looking up the date or weather all the time and it was painful enough that I eventually automated them away.

Somewhat like entrepreneurs in some bizarre “dashboard marketplace” universe (um, ew.), we let the market show demand for a thing before even considering to build it. It’s largely the reverse of every dashboarding project I’ve ever touched where either we’re “thinking ahead” and thus inventing dashboards in anticipation of information we might want to know. If not that, it’s what we think we want to make a decision on right now, only to go do the work and realize that in hindsight it didn’t really help make things clearer.

These dashboards are mostly being used because the pain of not having them had existed for sometimes years before it was annoying to put the effort into solving. I can’t think of any newfangled business process or product that has that benefit of hindsight. It’s not even close. There’s no comparison at all. Not even for “important” dashboards that everyone thinks is important like “how much money are we making this past hour?” — the only time that stat matters is if the number is is always non-zero but is suddenly zero. Plus, if something so bad happened that our revenue dashboard is now reading $0/hr when it should be $1 million/hr, other alarm systems should have been going off long before anyone would noticed a dashboard that rarely changes is having a different number on it.

I don’t think this is some magical new deep insight into making “good” dashboards. but it makes me curious to what extent that dashboards, or simple informational displays that help us make decisions, crop up in life.

What good dashboards are around us?

So my mind latched on to the notion that my life might have other useful dashboards that I’ve completely overlooked because they’re so useful and ubiquitous to me that it’s not even registering in my mind that they’re a dashboard. Something more complex than a mere blinking indicator light, but doesn’t have to involve charts or much visualization.

Transportation-related ones seem to pop up a lot. The NYC subway system has (only in the past decade or so!), put in displays at stations to indicate roughly when the next train will arrive, saving tons of people the need to lean over and gaze down the tunnel to see if a train was coming. Despite picking up the habit since I was a kid, I don’t feel the need to do it nearly as often anymore thanks to those little dashboards. Considering how there have been there have been occasional fatal accidents related to doing that, it’s a good thing.

Airports also have a bunch of useful dashboards, like the giant displays for what gate, departure time, and status of flights are in a terminal. There’s also usually a display at the arrivals area to let people know if a flight has landed or not yet. Think of all the hours of how many times some poor airline agent must have been asked for that information before the development of such boards. Electro-mechanical split-flap flip boards allowed signs to tackle this exact problem many decades ago (one patent for them dates to 1966).

I’ve also seen signs on the highways that give information that helps drivers make routing decisions. For example, “5 minutes to take lower level of bridge, 7 min to take upper level”. Drivers will act upon that information and load-balance the roadways of their own accord, so the two values are usually very similar unless there’s a major accident along one.

What’s interesting to me is that all the examples that are coming to mind are travel related. I suppose that says something about how the task of going from one place or another entails a lot of potentially risky decisions that users want to have answers to because it affects what decisions they must make on a timely basis. The consequences of making the wrong decisions can mean missing a flight, getting stuck in traffic unnecessarily, crash the car, or otherwise waiting for a train that might not arrive due to mechanical failure. Nowhere else in my otherwise quiet life am I required to make so many important decisions in any short timeframe, and this includes my professional work life.

Abandoned dashboards are… the default state

The fact that I’m finding very few examples of useful dashboards in my life is somewhat comforting to me. It tells me that… we humans by default, don’t rely upon “single panes of glass” to make many critical decisions throughout our daily lies. We are more than capable of gathering materials and relevant notes together to make decisions if the need arises. My dashboards are mostly destined to become failures before they’re even conceived.

Now, normally, most of us would consider it a giant tedious exercise to gather data from disparate sources — hence the constant demand for that fabled single pane of glass request. Automation of that process seems like a no brainer. But one benefit to the drudgery is that it slows us down and forces us to think about what data we’re considering. Is what we’re adding going to be worth the effort in obtaining it? What’s this expensive data point actually telling us? Introspection is probably a good thing for a novel decision where we’re not sure what actually matters in making the best decision.

Wait, novel decision? Why… why are we making relatively novel decisions based on dashboards? I don’t know about you, but lots of teams approach me to make dashboards to support making decisions about products and situations that are new and completely unexpected, we very much don’t know what to expect outside of very broad and uninteresting parameters like “is anyone using our thing?”

This is practically nothing like the dashboard examples I find in my real life where the placement and information presented has been dictated very closely by past experience with the problem. The useful dashboards are empowering very quick decisions tied to specific times and places. Mine… typically aren’t.

What have I been doing all my life?!?

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About this newsletter

I’m Randy Au, Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. Counting Stuff is a weekly newsletter about the less-than-sexy aspects of data science, UX research and tech. With some excursions into other fun topics.

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