When you look at your car dashboard, there are a few key features that stand out. You see:
- The speedometer to know how fast you’re going.
- The rev counter to know how fast the engine is running.
- The fuel gauge to see how much petrol is left.
- Temperature gauges to know the temperature of the engine and the air inside the car.
- The sat nav, if you’ve got one, to guide your journey.
- Warning lights for maintenance or potential issues with the car.
Sure, there are a lot of other metrics your car could track: how many trips you’ve made, how many times you’ve shifted gears, how many degrees left or right your steering wheel has turned, and so on. But none of these things are on the dashboard, because they wouldn’t be useful. They wouldn’t drive any change in behaviour, and they wouldn’t help you make better decisions on the road.
This leads to the first big takeaway: A dashboard should only feature the things that will help you make decisions and take action. For a car, these are the things that help you avoid danger, stay within the law, plan your next move, and avoid inconvenient downtime: how fast you’re going, how much fuel you have, where you’re going, and if there’s a problem with the car.
A data dashboard should be the same. It should provide information that drives action, whether that’s making a decision, avoiding a risk, or seizing an opportunity. It shouldn’t overwhelm you with information that has no immediate impact on what you do next.
The second takeaway is about time-efficiency. Car dashboards are designed to show you the most important information at a glance. You don’t need to study them. You don’t need to click through tabs or dig into numbers to understand what’s going on. You can just glance at it and continue driving.
This should be the gold standard for business data dashboards too. When you look at your dashboard, whether daily, weekly, or monthly, it should be instantly clear what the important information is, and what actions you need to take. If you need an hour to figure out what’s going on, the dashboard isn’t doing its job.
Finally, the best dashboards evolve. Car dashboards have changed over time as new challenges have arisen. A hundred years ago, parking wasn’t a big issue, but now, with the rise of urbanisation, finding parking is a real problem. Modern cars, like those from Mercedes-Benz, now use sensors and ignition data to help drivers find parking spaces nearby. It’s a new problem, with a new solution, informed by new data.
Likewise, data dashboards should evolve. As businesses face new challenges, dashboards should adapt. Ask yourself: What new problems have emerged? What new data should we be tracking? And, most importantly, how can we use this new data to make better decisions?
In the end, the best dashboards are those that help you move forward, safely and with confidence. So, the next time you commission or design a data dashboard, remember to take a cue from car dashboards. Only show information that the users knows what to do with, aim for data visualisations that can be understood within seconds, and expect the dashboard to evolve in response to new needs and new data.
