Designing dashboards founders actually open every morning
Most dashboards answer questions nobody asked. The five steps we use to find the one decision a screen should help with, and cut the rest.
Every founder we work with has a dashboard. Most of them open it once a week, out of guilt. The ones they open every morning share a few habits, and none of them are about charts.
Start with the decision
Before we draw a single widget, we ask one question: what will you decide after looking at this screen? Hiring, spend, a fix to ship. If nobody can name the decision, the screen is a report, and reports belong in an email.
- Write the decision at the top of the brief
- List the three numbers that change it
- Leave everything else for later
One screen, one question
Once the decision is clear, every screen gets exactly one question to answer. Revenue this week. Who is about to churn. What broke overnight. When a screen tries to answer two, both answers get worse.
A dashboard that answers ten questions answers none of them well.
Design the empty state first
A new account has no data, so the first screen most people ever see is the empty one. We design it before the busy one: one action to take, one number that will fill in, and no rows of zeros.
Let the numbers breathe
Fewer numbers, set bigger, with the comparison right beside them: this week against last, not a sparkline nobody reads. If a number needs a legend to make sense, it is not ready for the top of the screen.
Ship, watch, trim
We ship the smallest version, watch which numbers people actually open, and trim the rest after two weeks. A good dashboard gets shorter as it gets older.
