I recently saw a tweet from Dan Grady about "actionable analytics" and it made me think about a recent dashboarding experience. I was tasked with re-designing the dashboard for our front line staff-service desk employees, who work in a high-pace, high-ticket volume environment, and field service workers, who are always on the go and have little time at their workstations.
Initially their dashboard may have looked something like this:
With ServiceNow's in-platform reporting capabilities, it is very tempting to put pretty graphs with lots of colours on your dashboard. The dashboard looks so much more appealing that way.
But the folks for whom I was designing the dashboard were not managers nor executives. They did not have the luxury of time to analyze the data on the reports they were looking at. So, I opted to keep things simple and design reports that they could 'zero out'. Sometimes, simple lists and counts are preferable.
The dashboard ended up looking something more like this:
The left side of the dashboard is wider, takes up more real estate, and represents all the work assigned to the logged in fulfiller. It is a quick access for the fulfiller to get to the tickets on which he/she is working.
The right side of the dashboard is narrower, and represents items that need attention - for example: new tickets for the group that need to be assigned to an individual, or tickets assigned to the fulfiller that have not been updated in the last 7 days (ie. requires follow up).
The instructions for the widgets on the right side were simple: you need to get those lists to zero. If you load your dashboard and there is an item in the list, the widget is telling you that something needs your attention.
Creating widgets to 'zero out' has been an effective practice for creating dashboards for some of our front-line and field service fulfillers.
What dashboarding tips and tricks do you have to share with the community?
Note: The above is a re-post --This article seems to have been lost in the migration from the old community platform but I hoped that it might still be helpful to some, so I posted it again here.
If this post helped you, I would appreciate it if you marked it as 👍 helpful.
