Global Dashboards, Canned and Custom, via Modular "Report" Widget Library
Problem to solve
Today's one-off approach to dashboard/chart views are:
- Inconsistent - Different teams are designing and building charts differently in silos.
- Inflexible - Users cannot customize reports to emphasize key content and tell the stories their audiences need to be informed and or act.
- Missing the mark - Because many teams are involved in dashboards and few, if any, can afford to specialize in dashboard, data visualizations, and reporting design and dev best practices. As a result, reports are often sub-optimal from usability and value perspective. Data is often incomplete, sub-optimally formatted, difficult to consume, in-actionable and or non-accessible.
- Expensive and non-scalable - It's costly to design and iterate because many teams are learning how to research, design and build data visualizations in silos. Each report has to be built from scratch, even when a single data visualization might be used in many places (contrast this vs the savings of a modular approach).
Intended users
All users who create and or consume reports of any kind.
Proposal
Create actionable dashboards of all kinds via global dashboard system that uses a categorized, modular "report" widget library to create dashboards of all kinds (comparative example below; lo-fi mockup pending...)
Example requirements (not all are must haves for an MVC):
- Make app-wide dashboards more valuable, efficient, consistent and scalable by creating a centralized dashboard initiative and technical/best practice framework stage teams can plug into.
- Allow users to access default dashboards of value to them, such as replacing existing dashboard-like views in the app with the new and improved modular system.
- Allow users to create custom dashboards, by modifying default dashboards or from scratch, via modular, categorized, widget-based report library.
- Allow users to find and combine product management, development, design, support and other widgets into various dashboard combinations to satisfy various use cases.
- Allow users to easily find and add modular reporting widgets via categorized library and or labels.
- Allow users to save reports, and move, rename and duplicate and delete saved reports.
- Allow users to view and find saved reports.
- Allow users to flag reports that matter most to them as "My Reports", and provide an easy way for them to access said reports from a central location
- Allow users to adjust layout and them so they can emphasize key content in order to surface most valuable information for their intended audience
- Allow users to share and schedule dashboard notifications and or emails on various time intervals
- A dashboard marketplace could allow users to comment on existing widgets and create new widgets of their own that could be shared with others.
References
Comparative example:
Hubspot Default Dashboards: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/dashboard/default-marketing-dashboard-reports
Hubspot Custom Dashboards: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/dashboard/customize-your-dashboards
Permissions and Security
Documentation
Testing
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
Links / references
@clenneville @jeremy @sarahod @uhlexsis @cperessini @ClemMakesApps @ameliabauerly @kencjohnston