Basking in a dashboard’s warm glow

When some people look at dashboards, they want to see patterns but not reasons. “They don’t want to read the fine print,” said one attendee in Lyndsay Wise’s dashboards seminar at Enterprise Data World in San Francisco yesterday. That’s what the man learned in one data-quality project for a human resources department.

He was frank enough to call drill-down “the fine print” — the suggestion that the “why?” is just noise. He escaped before I could find out more.

Had his complacent users been victims of abusive parents or bad teachers? I’ve worked with such users. I trust them, I like them, and most businesses couldn’t do without them. But I still wonder about them, as some of them might wonder about me.

One reason for the hesitation about “fine print”: we have too much data. We know that. Tom Davenport ponders the overwhelmingness of it all in his blog today. Neil Raden probably wrote about this 15 years ago. Casual users feel it more and more.

For the overwhelmed, there’s the palliative dashboard. It works the way Mozart does for who can’t tell Mozart from Schmozart: knowing it’s Mozart makes them feel good. The palliative dashboard is contrary to…

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