Building analytics dashboards

Build it as a structured project — components, hooks, and helpers in separate files, not one giant file. Hand-rolled SVG is fine, often better than a chart library for bespoke interactions.

A dashboard answers questions; it isn't a page of charts. Its dimensions (time plus the data's categorical axes) are the product: make every one filterable, cross-linked, and honest about what it can't show.

For the visual identity — type, palette, spacing, and polish — use the frontend-design skill, and ask the user for brand guidelines or a reference if the direction isn't clear. This skill covers only what's specific to data and dashboards: pipeline, interaction, and visualization.

Data pipeline

If the dashboard stores source data or derived views in named volumes, use workflow-volume-design for file ownership, bounded updates, retention, and capacity.

• Refresh on a schedule, and let users trigger a refresh on demand. Coalesce concurrent refreshes so they do not stampede the source. Put the schedule on one entry point that fans out to the fetchers, so cadence lives in one place.
• Fetch incrementally: pull only what's new since the last stored point, but keep a full-backfill path for a cold or empty store.
• Retry transient source failures with backoff, and never overwrite good data with an empty or failed result — a bad fetch leaves the last good data in place.
• Store raw source data under a stable schema so display changes don’t force a re-fetch. Keep the inputs to a transform, such as a lookup table, so derived views can be rebuilt when mappings change. Retain only the history the product needs.
• Aggregate on the fly only while the query remains bounded. When the raw volume is too large to load and roll up per request, query pre-summarized data at the source or precompute bounded rollups during refresh.
• Let users download the data (e.g. CSV): the processed rows behind the current view (respecting active filters, for finance/reporting) and/or the raw records (for their own analysis).