Our users understood every chart perfectly, and then went and did absolutely nothing with it.
My biggest fear with any dashboard is that people will understand it perfectly and then ignore it. It’s a weird way to fail, because nothing is broken.
That was exactly the worry on a monetisation product I worked on at Pax8. Partners could open analytics and see how their products were doing. Then, to actually do something about it, they had to open a completely different tool and remember everything they’d just seen. I can barely remember why I opened the fridge, so I didn’t have high hopes.
I kept joking that our analytics were turning into a museum. You could look at everything, but nobody was really supposed to touch it.
For years I treated clarity as the finish line. I still care about it a lot, but a clear chart that leads nowhere is just a very well designed shrug.
So we built a bridge between the two, the Opportunity layer. It picks up a signal, say low impressions in one category, and turns it into a suggestion with a reason attached. Click it and the promo builder opens already filled in with whatever you were just looking at, so you don’t have to remember anything.
Around the same time someone asked for benchmark toggles on every chart, so partners could see how they stacked up against everyone else. It sounds smart in a roadmap meeting, but in practice a five-person partner ends up comparing itself to a five-hundred-person partner and feeling either amazing or terrible, both for no good reason. I said no, which is not my favourite word to say to stakeholders, and parked it in the backlog until there’s enough data to make the comparison fair.
The last bit is the one most products skip. Show people what happened. If you launch a promotion and the product just stays silent, you learn that your actions don’t matter, and why would you bother again? So the flow ends with “did it work?” and the answer feeds straight back into analytics.
Usability tests won’t show you any of this. People sail through every “can you find the number” task and still walk away with no idea what to do with it. You find out months later, when you see who keeps coming back.