Understand the Process of Designing a Dashboard
The overall process of designing a dashboard can be summarized as follows:
Gather information about project requirements.
Determine the purpose of the dashboard.
Determine the users of the dashboard.
Frame and prioritize goals and deliverables.
Create dashboard drafts and layouts, and ask for feedback and iterate as needed.
In this chapter, we are going to focus on the first point: gathering information about project requirements.
Gather the Right Information Efficiently
Meet with the Stakeholder and Ask Questions
Meeting with stakeholders is very important throughout the process of creating a dashboard, as it has to be useful to its end-user (more on this later). You need to get the right information to utilize as inputs for your design.
I have a piece of advice:
The more you understand about the project and stakeholder needs, the better equipped you are to determine the dashboards you should create to facilitate decision-making.
Take a moment and reflect: What would you ask your client to help you understand their needs? Can you list three questions?
Perhaps you came up with a few questions like: "Who will be using the dashboard?" or "How often will this dashboard be consulted?" If so, then you are on the right track.
Regardless of what set of questions and tactics you use in your meetings, make sure to get the project context from the stakeholder. Allow the stakeholder to use their own words: What are the business goals? What are the business problems? What are their priorities?
It is also a good idea to ask the stakeholder about their expectations. Allow them to describe how exactly they think you can help. This will give you a sense of their expectations around the final deliverables. Be sure to paraphrase or recap requests and details throughout the meeting. This will help to avoid any misunderstandings or misinterpretations.
Use a Checklist
I like to use a general checklist of questions to help guide my conversion with stakeholders. By having questions listed in a reference document, I can take advantage of meetings with stakeholders to extract the most critical information while minimizing the amount of unfocused, back-and-forth conversations.
Remember the video of what an initial information-gathering meeting might look like for the dashboard we were tasked with?
In that meeting, the analyst used the following questions and tactics from the checklist:
Our Mission
Let's take a moment to reflect on the initial meeting that you saw in the video above. What were the main takeaways from that meeting? Can you list them? The answers are below - try not to peek! ;)
Summary
In many projects, time is limited. Getting the right information from stakeholders as efficiently as possible is also very important.
Meeting with the stakeholder is a vital part of the information gathering process.
Use a checklist to help guide your conversation with stakeholders. It will help ensure that you are soliciting the right information and minimize the amount of unfocused, back-and-forth conversations.
This checklist can be used as a starting point, but remember to adapt it to your own needs.
In the next chapter, we will look at how to determine the purpose of the dashboard.
