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?
Replies
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?
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 😅
Product Hunt
@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?
Product Hunt
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).
Product Hunt
Thanks for the tips!
Purposeful Poop
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.
Milestone Content Studio
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.
Ugh, I know this feeling too well! Dashboards start out as a way to stay on top of things, and before you know it, they become this overwhelming mess of charts, filters, and numbers that don’t even feel useful anymore. What’s worked for me is setting strict rules on what actually deserves a spot on the dashboard. If I have not used a metric to make decisions for more than 3 months, it goes into a secondary view (or gets removed entirely). Also, having one "source of truth" instead of pulling random datasets from different places has saved me a lot of headaches.