Trial run of new
Beyond Dashboards workshop

Guinea pigs needed!

 

[This workshop has already taken place. See upcoming workshops.]

What?

I'm developing a new workshop called Beyond Dashboards and will be conducting a trial run of the workshop at Klipfolio's Ottawa office (thanks!) on December 21st, 2018. I'm looking for about 15 people to attend this one-day workshop to provide feedback and help me work out the kinks. Given the workshop's current "beta" state, there will be no cost to attend but I'll be looking for people who match the workshop’s target audience, namely, people who are directly responsible for designing or developing dashboards for internal users, customers or partners in large or mid-size organizations. If that sounds like you and you're interested in attending, skip to the end of this page for next steps.

What's in it for you

The Beyond Dashboard workshop arose from my experiences designing dashboards and other types of information displays for over 50 Fortune 1,000, NGO, and government organizations, and from teaching dashboard design to over 1,000 business intelligence professionals. Ultimately, it deals with the question of why so many dashboards still fail to meet users' and organizations' expectations.

While most courses and books on dashboard design focus on making better visual design choices (colours, layout, graph types, etc.), I've seen many dashboards with great visual designs still fail to deliver real value and user traction. This is because the underlying cause of dashboard dissatisfaction usually has to do with the way in which information has been organized onto the entire set of dashboards, reports, self-serve analysis tools and other types of information displays that are available to users.

The Beyond Dashboards workshop teaches participants how to organize information into six major types of purpose-specific displays that meet users' data-related needs much more directly, resulting in dashboards that users actually like instead of merely tolerate:

  • Problem-scanning displays

  • Metric diagnosis displays

  • Performance monitoring displays

  • Slice-and-dice displays

  • Self-serve analysis displays

  • Canned analysis and reference displays

The workshop covers best practices via well-designed examples of each type of display, and provides guidance on how to connect them into a cohesive system of displays that enables users to quickly and easily find the information they need in order to do their jobs.

This workshop will eventually be turned into a book and more details about both the book and the workshop can be found here. I've given short talks about the content of this workshop at several conferences in recent months and the level of interest has been very high.

What I'm asking for

  • A day of your time. Because I'm limiting the participant count to 15, if you agree to attend, you must be present for the full day (9am to 5pm) barring something truly catastrophic, since I'll be setting aside a seat specifically for you.

  • Patience. The workshop is still in a "beta" state and this will be the first full run-through with a group. The pacing and timing will be off. I'll be making notes in mid-sentence. Some slides will still have "TBD" on them.

  • Feedback. I'll ask you to make note of any positive or (especially) negative feedback during the workshop and to fill out a short questionnaire at the end of the day.

Next steps

If you have questions, please contact me via this contact form. If you're interested in being a guinea pig, please use the same contact form but also include the following in your message:

  • Current employer and title, or connect with me on LinkedIn

  • Brief (~ two sentences is fine) description of your current and/or past dashboard-related responsibilities.

  • Confirmation that you're available for the entire day (9 to 5) on December 21st