You might think that’s too complex to display! But you know what, if you do not display the calculation in this example, you’re effectively assuming every user of this dashboard is doing that in his head.
From my perspective, that is even worse. What you’re aiming for here, is making complexity transparent, or to say it in different words, to “
stop aggregating away complexity”.
Amazing dashboards have another feature, they are the true iPhone because they simply do not have that complexity! Once you are able to make the complexity visible, you might also be able to help a process to reduce it, design a north star metric that is easy to understand, which actually carries true meaning in itself.
Amazing dashboards are like the Twitter search. They have only plain and simple concepts on the big dashboard which 95% of the people use 95% of the time. And then they have layers and layers.
Keep this example in mind, the Twitter search and the dashboard. Now think about your data products, are they good a hiding complexity? How about the dashboards you use every day? I know a bunch of the things I built suck from that perspective.
And of course, leave feedback if you have a strong opinion about the newsletter! So?