Don’t Be Me – Purpose: Who are Using the Dashboards

August 16, 2021

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

If you are having trouble viewing this article, please report it here.

Welcome to my second entry of the Don’t Be Me series where I go through my mistakes that I have learned during my training at the Data School Down Under and I hope that anyone who does read this can avoid these mistakes. The following discussion here relates to Part 2 of my Project Starter Blog so I recommend checking out that blog as well to get the full scope on my take about story telling with data.

In my experience so far, I had realised that one area that I could improve on is giving a dashboard purpose. What I mean by this is that often I would create a dashboard with no particular end user in mind, leaving it without a story to tell or an explanation of the data.

Why give it purpose? – A birthday cake analogy

Once you’ve prepared the data, it can be easy to get straight to making a dashboard and then test out the functionality of what you built. After spending some time pondering about it, I associated it with making a birthday cake for someone. It has a clear purpose with a particular person that it has been designed for.

Baking a birthday cake for someone’s birthday has purpose.

Designed for someone in mind
The intention is to have people gather to celebrate their birthday and notice it’s significance
It has an important part in the story of a person’s life

Now, how does creating a dashboard with data relate to this?

Dashboard was designed for an end user
It could be used to help explore the data or generate actionable insight that is significant for the users
It tells a story about the data

So when you take out the birthday in the birthday cake situation, it is just a cake that lacks some purpose but still delicious to consume. A dashboard that has all the perfect ingredients but lacks purpose becomes less useful.

How to give it purpose? – Some ideas to keep in mind

Who is it for?
What do they need to know?
How can they use it to find what they need to know?
Why would it be important to them?

Thanks for reading and just Don’t Be Me!

Next time when you create a dashboard have these thoughts in mind so you can avoid to make the same mistakes as I did. Keep an eye out for my next blog for Don’t Be Me, where I will explore handling time management for short deadlines. See you next time!