Data via quick company dashboards, in all its multi-faceted glory: a possible way forward.
In every industry, data leaders play a critical role in crisis response, and they need to track new priorities as cutting useless costs before everything. In today’s high-stakes environment, “where organizations must make decisions at a rapid pace, there’s arguably never been such an imperative for data leaders to provide organizations with timely and accurate data,” say leaders at McKinsey Technology.
But the big question is how do companies, in these circumstances, make data accessible to a large audience of untrained business users, and in such a limited amount of time?
Even if Data Leaders can streamline their high-level decision-making, this is a point in time when data needs to be democratized, make its use widespread among your customers, ensuring fast and easy access to insights. And even more so now that remote work is now a global standard.
This is where convention over configuration – or a built-in User Experience with pre-defined capabilities based on design best practices, could play a major role.
The Look, The Collab, The Reach, and The Learning: 4 Essential Pieces to Crack that Quick Dashboard Jigsaw
1. A great UX is both a time saver and an adoption booster.
There is no lack of vendors offering you the possibility of doing anything, anytime and anyway you want. New capabilities are added every month to already complex platforms, but it just adds to the expertise, time, investment, and training needed to get hold of these tools and to adopt them.
In order to create a dashboard that is easy to adapt, focus on what truly matters, build it, and then measure it. You’ll quickly notice that giving users the choice of Font doesn’t bring that much value to users, and it doesn’t boost adoption. Getting into the habit of adding context to a graph, however, helps in delivering a clearer message, and affects adoption by 36%.
Instead of thinking of fancy and dense design ideas, create a dashboard that is:
- Easy to use, in any devices
- Easy to understand when it comes to KPIs
- Tells a clear data story with contextualized insights
- Offers total autonomy for users so that they don’t keep having to keep back to you with queries or questions.
Once you found what works for you, use your learning to deploy at a larger scale, and measure how your framework affects adoption and usability. Ultimately, you’ll be able to use templates you’ve built, or leverage those of a vendor that specializes in a certain industry or department.
After a series of projects, you’ll gain clearer visibility onto what matters, what works, and what simply doesn’t. Your deployment times will shrink thanks to the difficult design-related tasks being cut down to a minimum thanks to your consistent monitoring and data-driven approach to design, with no dependency on UX experts. Ultimately, your designs will be so simple that zero training will be required by your end-users. In other words, package the best practices of easy data communication in your user experience so that you don’t waste time or resources in designing dashboards ever again.
In this unprecedented Post-Covid19 situation, it is crucial to deliver insights as quickly as possible to help the workforce act. This is why having a framework to start with, for app builders, is such a game-changer.
2. Collaboration is now more important than ever before
Still, within the concept of a quick delivery, enterprise collaboration is at an all-time high, as revealed by Okta’s app usage reports. Zoom video conferencing is everybody’s preferred choice of collaboration, having seen a 110% uptick.
However, collaborating in real-time for the creation of dashboards whilst working remotely has still not become a mainstream feature within the Data & Analytics world. A collective dashboard is a time-consuming affair – several bits and pieces have to come together, and often something or someone fails to perform their part.
This is where a quick dashboard powered by an analytics application can let you bypass all this clutter and create a unifying zone for better communication, smoother collaboration, and top-notch productivity.
The optimal solution would enable users to discuss and exchanges ideas through a chat and stay within the dashboard ecosystem to keep up the pace.
3. Dashboards Accessible anytime, anywhere, oh yeah!
In this new, WFH world, being platform-agnostic is critical. Your end-user should be able to switch between devices and platforms with razor-sharp speed & accuracy.
But the problem is that most BI tools require manual intervention to right-size the platform across different devices. This means it is a long process, requires maintenance, needs regular monitoring – ruining all your quick dashboard deployment plans.
By working with a web-based solution and by maintaining a mobile-first approach, you can avoid all these pitfalls and:
- Remove any installation complexities for your end-users
- Amp-up user accessibility since UX is already built-into the platform and can instantly align itself with device type and screen size.
- Provide unconditional accessibility and boost adoption.
In other words, your quick dashboard dream is now a reality, with zero downtime, maintenance, and management hassles (a.k.a. it is crisis-ready and collaboration friendly).
4. Training is essential – but simplicity is even better
A major hurdle on the path to a quick dashboard is getting everyone on-board. This requires hours of training exercises, ensuring the entire customer team is up-to-speed. Of course, data literacy is a must-have for any company – but in these circumstances, a truly business-user-centric product should be responsive and adaptive, with minimal dependence on training, even no training at all.
In short, this dashboard has to be as simple as any application you use on your phone on a daily basis.
What this implies is that you need to quickly deploy the dashboard regardless of data literacy levels, ensuring that the UX is refreshingly simple and accessible.
The funny thing is physical proximity and data literacy go hand in hand (studies suggest that of the 72% of companies offering data literacy programs, 88% report learning/assimilation as an informal lunchtime or water cooler activity). So, keeping the learning minimal and the dashboard simple is vital at this time of social distancing.
And the great thing is that analytics platform builders offer a lucid, activation ready experience, which means that quick deployment of your dashboard is now a reality.
So please if you have the choice, please select a web-based tech to be instantly mobile with no rework on the dashboard.
Never Say Never Again: Why an Easy to Use, Quick Dashboard is an Evergreen Must-Have
Good companies survive tough times while great companies adapt to emerging scenarios. It’s a bit of a shortcut, but it’s true.
Today, digital-first is the new mantra for any company and this requires the right tools, strategies, and technologies. At Toucan, we understand the importance of fast and accurate platform delivery – both now and in the times to come.
Our technologies offer modern solutions to the problems businesses are trying to solve today, for themselves as well as for their customers. By working with us, you can create a dashboard in as little as 2 weeks because of our design-first approach.
This, we believe, will help you and your end-users to collaborate better and work faster during this crisis.
A quick dashboard isn’t just about stitching together a platform and starting delivery. It also means you are responding to the environment at large and are simplifying human-to-human collab to ensure that the engines of business (i.e. productivity) run smoothly without interruption.
In short, in no time, you can build a post-crisis dashboard with automated-generated data and iterate to stick to your vision but also to adapt to this very unstable situation.
I hope you like this article! If you want to share with us the best practices about Post-crisis Dashboards or have any questions feel free to click the button below.
