Alex Gap

Best ways to fight dashboard chaos?

As my dashboards grow more complicated they always seem to descend into disorganized chaos with a bunch of different datasets and charts all over the place.

What are some good way to fight the chaos and keep things organized when dashboards start getting complicated?

Add a comment

Replies

Best
Matt Carroll

A feature that would be nice (that i do manually) is "prune" dead cells. i.e I deployed the project, but there are 20 cells that I was experimenting with and ultimately didn't use. It would be nice to be able to prune those.

Tomina Veronika

Totally feel this. What helped me was setting up a naming system and color-coding by data source. Also switched to using Looker — their folders saved my sanity 😅

Alex Gap

@tomina_veronika I've been trying to get better at using a consistent naming system; it definitely helps!

I haven't really looked at Looker; how does it compare to Hex?

Andrew Stewart

One thing that might help are defining components that can DRY out reporting across various dashboards.


I also recently discovered how useful the minimap on the left is for navigating and organizing cells. I periodically use it to help make sure I'm naming the cells clearly (and deleting garbage cells).


Ruban Phukan

Totally feel you on the dashboard sprawl. We saw the same issue with inboxes too — everyone drowning in data but starving for signal.

One trick we found?
Push only critical ops updates via a single, auto-curated daily digest. No dashboards to babysit.

Curious what’s your ideal dashboard even look like? One chart? Or full cockpit?

Siddharth Pereira
BYOD. I’d imagine thats the future, where customers interact with an agent or prompt what they want to see and voila, on demand widgets!
Oxana Maurina

Absolutel get that - complicated dashboards can spiral into chaos fast. I’ve found that grouping charts by purpose and using consistent naming + colors makes a huge difference in keeping things mentally (and visually) tidy.

Hanvo
I feel this too! What helped me was limiting the number of widgets per dashboard and grouping related data into sections. Also, using consistent naming conventions + filters keeps things way more manageable.