It’s About Flow: Designing Dashboards that Actually Get Used

When it comes to spotting patterns and trends in the data around you, your eye is one of the best tools around. Its about the freedom to let your eyes and brain do what they already do so well together. Say youve analyzed a lot of data and come to a hard-won conclusion.

Visually, it’s easy to bounce from one point to another.

And with your eyes, you can make intuitive connections before you even realize you’re thinking about them.

That’s what we call flow.

It’s about the freedom to let your eyes and brain do what they already do so well together.

And we think that’s pretty important.

But it’s also essential to your dashboards—and we’ll show you why.

Say you’ve analyzed a lot of data and come to a hard-won conclusion.

You’ve spent hours placing all of your best visuals into a single dashboard.

But how do you get people to actually use it?

You need to consider they’ll experience that dashboard.

Will their attention be clearly directed?

Will they have to interrupt their thoughts at times to understand what they’re seeing?

To answer these questions, you need to take a step back from your data and pretend you have no idea what it’s saying.

It’s actually not that different from writing a story.