Design Dashboards That Drive Decisions 

Let’s be honest, everyone loves a beautiful dashboard. I’ve seen it so many times in the companies I’ve worked with: the obsession with polished visuals, perfect color palettes, and fancy charts. And I get it. I’ve spent countless hours myself tweaking visuals until they looked “just right”. But all the pretty charts and complex format settings from your dashboard are useless unless they actually change someone's mind or shift how they run their business.  The lack of reports that accomplish this purpose is also something I’ve seen across many of the companies that I’ve worked with. 

Here’s a scenario you’ve probably seen at your company: your manager opens a dashboard full of flashy charts, skims the visuals, nods politely, and goes back to making decisions based on what they already had in mind. The dashboard indeed looks great, but nothing really changed. The fancy report didn’t help in decision making. But you can change that. These are the four considerations that anyone must think through before putting any visuals together, to ensure not a fancy dashboard but an actionable report. 

1. Don’t build blindly. Ask the decision-maker first 
   
   Before starting the design of a new report, make sure to talk to the person who is going to act on the information they see in the report. Too often, analysts build in isolation and end up answering questions no one asked for. Sit down with the decision-maker and ask them what are the KPIs that really move the needle for them. Their answer should define your dashboard’s entire structure. Avoid guessing. The fastest way to lose your audience is to assume you know what they care about, but the fastest way to earn their trust is to ask first and build second. 
2. Comparison (context) is where insight lives. 
   
   A single number is a dead end. We all think in contrasts: month over month, campaign A vs. campaign B, vendor X vs. vendor Y. If your dashboard only shows one state, it’s not telling a story: it’s just a snapshot of reality. Your CMO really doesn’t care that this month’s CTR is 3.8%; they care that it’s up 8 percentage points from last month and above the industry benchmark by 4. Your CEO is not only interested in knowing that this quarter's sales are $3.4M, but in the fact that this represents an increase of 4% from last quarter but a decrease of 6% from the same quarter last year. Comparison is where insights live. 
   
   When you design to show direction rather than state, you transform your stakeholders from passive observers into curious thinkers. They will not only ask “what happened?” but will start thinking of “why it happened?"
3. Automate the boring stuff. 
   
   The saddest fate of a dashboard isn’t being ugly; it’s being abandoned. Nothing kills adoption faster, from a business-user perspective, than a dashboard that’s outdated, or that requires many manual steps to be updated.  
   
   If your manager opens your report on a Monday and the numbers still show Friday’s data, trust might be gone. Once your users stop trusting your dashboard, they stop opening it, and once they stop opening it, your report is basically dead, no matter how many hours you spent building it. Automation equals credibility. When the data of your report refreshes automatically, alerts trigger at the right time, and stakeholders know the numbers are always as fresh as they can be, making decisions based on the results of your dashboard becomes a habit, not an exception. 
   
   Let your data stack do the heavy lifting. Whenever possible, rely on automation—not manual effort—to keep your dashboards running smoothly. Your data team’s focus should be on building robust data pipelines, scheduling refreshes, and configuring alerts for anomalies or thresholds. At Brooklyn Data Co. (Velir’s Data Studio), we specialize in implementing and optimizing modern data stacks using cutting-edge technologies and industry best practices. If you’re looking to strengthen your data infrastructure, our team is here to help. 
4. Make it impossible to ignore 
   
   User adoption isn’t about pushing more dashboards; it’s about making them unskippable. You usually accomplish this when you design for human psychology, not just for data nerds. 
   
   Make your report emotional. A good visual doesn’t only show change; it feels like change. If the sales of your company are decreasing more than they should given a seasonality, your dashboard shouldn’t look neutral, it should trigger urgency. Make sure to use colors, charts, and storytelling so the users know what matters. 
   
   Show impact, not just results. Data is powerful when it answers both the “what” and the “why” of the reality of the business. Don’t stop at “Churn is 4.5% this month” but make your dashboard show that this represents $110k lost in revenue because 7 of your customers are not renewing this month. You should try to attach every number to a human, operational, or financial consequence. That’s when dashboards become conversations that drive decisions and not just PDFs on your manager’s email.

You now know what the definition of done is: if your dashboard can’t make someone pause, react, or act, it’s not finished yet. Pretty dashboards don’t change companies; useful ones do.