Dashboard Week - Day 2
There’s a refrain I've heard more and more often since the generative AI revolution began:
“This is a solution looking for a problem”
Day 2 of Dashboard Week made me feel like someone with plenty of potential answers - looking desperately for a question. We were tasked with using any data available on UNICEF’s website to make a dashboard that analyzes an issue and tells a story. The amount of data that UNICEF makes available is huge, and covers an overwhelming breadth of topics and issue areas.
I spent the first 2 hours of a 5.5 hour project just trying to figure out how to focus my analysis and my dashboard - and I still ended up with a final product that was too broad.
There were some good lessons to learn in the process of trying to pare down seemingly limitless options into one concise HHmessage, though, and during presentation, discussion, and feedback time with my colleagues and our coach.
Research
Other people have likely done some kind of work - analysis, reporting, advocacy - around whatever broad issue(s) you’ve chosen to focus on. Take some time to find those articles or reports or whatever you can. You don’t have to read through them in detail, but even just reading headers and skimming can give you an idea of ways this data could be applied to answer impactful questions.
Ask your own questions - before doing anything else
Once you’ve found some datasets, look at the data and start asking questions. Ask as many as you can think of -broad, narrow, big, small- and don’t worry about if or how the data will actually be able to answer them. At least a few of the questions you ask will be answerable, and using them to help focus your next steps will work much better than searching blindly through the data for any insight you can find later on in the process.
Find answers and get specific
Take the questions above and try to see if the data can answer them. You’ll get a sense pretty quickly what will be possible and/or easy to answer, and those first questions will no doubt spawn new questions once you start digging in. The important thing to keep in mind at this stage is to try and keep your focus as narrow as you can, and start thinking about what kind of story you can tell with your questions and answers.
What is the user / viewer going to walk away thinking about?
Focus on the one idea, conclusion, fact that a user of your dashboard will retain after they’ve used your dashboard or seen your presentation. It should be concise and hopefully impactful enough that they won’t forget about your dashboard an hour after they’ve seen it.