#SWDchallenge: dashboard stories

Aug 2

With every passing day, more and more organizations are incorporating dashboards into their analytic processes. This is hardly surprising. Now that we have more data than we’ve ever had before, it’s critical that companies take advantage of this resource. Providing analysts with tools like dashboards—giving them the ability to perform more and better assessments of the business landscape—is critical to stay ahead in a competitive environment.

Here’s the thing: dashboards are fantastic tools for exploring your data and uncovering interesting, actionable insights. They are less fantastic at communicating those insights with clarity. By their very nature, dashboards are designed to make it easy for a user to interact, filter, zoom, reframe, explore. This functionality that makes discovery and iteration simple becomes a liability when you have a particular story you intend to tell.

The experience of presenting a specific narrative with a dashboard is somewhat like managing a kindergarten classroom at storytime. The teacher/presenter has something interesting and linear to communicate to the rest of the people in the room, but all of those people have the world’s shortest attention spans, and are endlessly distracted by all of the visual stimulation they see around them. They’re looking all around, they’re trying to see something that only interests them, they don’t care about what other people want, and most of them aren’t listening.

While dashboards are great at prompting exploration and discovery, you’ll often find more success in the explanatory phase of your analysis if you create a communication specifically designed for your audience and your particular findings. That way, you can tailor your message and deliver your critical insights in a way that resonates strongly, and you won’t need to compete with the natural curiosity of a human being within arm’s reach of a dashboard.

The challenge

In this challenge, use any exploratory dashboard as your source material (publicly available or of your own creation), and create a visualization based on that data that tells a specific story. Your submission can be a single graph, a slide, a progression of images, whatever you want: as long as there is a clear, unmistakable story that you’re telling with it. Share your creation in the community by August 31st at 3pm PT.

Include a link to the original dashboard as part of your commentary, and please upload a screenshot of it as well, so we can easily see the source material. If there is any specific feedback or input that you would find helpful, include that in your commentary as well.