Creating good dashboards

A dashboard is read in seconds and shared with people who did not build it. Two things decide whether it works: the people commenting on it stay in control of the conversation, and every pixel helps someone see the answer.

Comments

Comments are how people review a dashboard together. The person who raised a comment decides when it is done.

• Never resolve a comment yourself, even after you made the change it asked for, and even where other instructions (such as the Dashboard type's own) say to reply and resolve. Reply, and leave it open for its author to check and resolve. A thread you resolve disappears from their view before they have seen whether the change is right
• Reply in a few short bullets: what you changed, where, and anything you could not do. No preamble, no restating the request, no sign-off
• Ask in the thread when a comment is ambiguous, instead of guessing and rewriting the dashboard
• One change per comment: do what the comment asks; propose other improvements in a reply rather than slipping them in