Dashboards Are Dead: 3 Years Later

On April 9, 2020, I published an essay called “<a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/dashboards-are-dead-b9f12eeb2ad2?ref=blog.count.co" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Dashboards are Dead</a>”. I wrote it mainly to vent my pent-up frustrations as a data analyst, and yes, also to take on the most popular data tool at the time: the dashboard. To my surprise, a lot of people read it. Over 60,000 people in the first weekend alone, and over 250,000 as of writing this. Something in the now-infamous article clearly resonated with others (or just really pissed them off). Over the last three years, I’ve attempted to write various follow-up articles but have shied away at the last moment, not sure exactly what I wanted to say. This weekend marks three years since that article, and by now I might have just enough distance to see things clearly — both where the industry was then, and how far we’ve come. <img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/1*tkulAuJ0RKHMusPEmOYslw.jpeg" style="height:467px; width:700px" /> Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@sonjalangford?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Sonja Langford</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/eIkbSc3SDtI?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Unsplash</a> <h1>Dashboards aren’t dead</h1> Don’t worry, I see the elephant in the corner. Of course, dashboards aren’t actually dead. For the record, that wasn’t what I was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole?ref=blog.count.co" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">suggesting</a>. The point I was trying to make is that dashboards have always been good for one thing: quickly displaying numbers. But we’ve been misusing them by expecting them to do everything for us. We’ve asked them to tell stories, be visually appealing, convey information quickly, act as a data portal, and do anything else we could think of. Of course, they couldn’t do all of that. <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/dashboards-are-dead-3-years-later-72347757bfa6">Learn More</a>