Hi Elizabeth, This is definitely a common challenge!

Here’s what I’ve seen in practice — let me know if your org is similar.

What usually happens is that the people creating dashboards (like us) get a LOT of requests for different variables, datasets, charts, slices of data, etc. That’s great at first. People are interested in the data; we want to be responsive and helpful to their requests.

A year goes by, and then another. And the dashboard(s) have ballooned and ballooned and ballooned. There are so many variables, datasets, charts, and slices of data. It often becomes unusable.

If this happens in your org, don’t forget to pare down again. DON’T ask people, “Which parts of these dashboards should we delete?” That causes unnecessary stress. (“What if we need that chart/dashboard/slice at some point…???”)

INSTEAD, try asking, “What’s the most valuable part of this dashboard(s)?” You’re listening to see what’s *not* mentioned. Did users mention A, B, and D? Great! Then remove C.

Do you have any thoughts on guidance for data viz designers working for very large companies with the goal of driving self-service? I ask because I work for a huge global company composed of hundreds of sub-businesses and literally countless stakeholder needs (in terms of filtering requirements to arrive at the population of interest, questions being asked, metrics of interest, etc.).

The Center of Excellence I’m a member of aims to drive self-service for virtually all business needs …and so I find myself almost always designing interactive dashboards to meet the diverse needs of our end users (the dashboards have different layers – a high level summary, a middle level, and then details through tooltip pages and/or drill through pages).

My biggest struggle is how to meet this self-service need, when (a) the requirements are largely undefined (because we can’t possibly gather requirements for every single permutation of end user groups) and (b) a huge percentage of our end users are both non-technical and extremely busy, and so unlikely to have the time and/or ability to use the tools we offer. I’m doing my best to have clean, simple designs with built in help, easy access to metric definitions, and a training portal, but I worry that self-service is a pipe-dream and I am set up for failure.

Do you have any advice?