In 2015 I had to spend a number of weeks visiting one of our local hospital’s intensive care units. On one of my visits I got to thinking about the interfaces of the various monitoring machines. There were machines from a range of manufacturers and of varying ages but the display of information was universally simple and minimal.
For the main monitoring system, despite the variety of data collected, it only showed the 2, 3, or maybe 4, variables which were most appropriate for each patient. For those who have seen or developed a organisation or system dashboard it might be surprising that they haven’t aimed for the fancy, flashy, information-dense type of display which are common in software.
The reason for this might be clear: patient care is high-stakes and can be high-pressure and getting the right information quickly and accurately is vitally important. Don’t be clever with important information; convey it simply and clearly. If it is important to convey the information then you probably shouldn’t go making some crazy cool (but hard-to-read) charts just because your visualisation library lets you.
This idea reminded me of a description I heard once about a Scrum board. When a team is using the Scrum methodology for project management the Scrum board has stories broken down into tasks, with each task being represented on the board by a sticky note. The sticky note is moved from column to column based on the current state of that task. It was said that the board should be an “information radiator”, such that the important information (the state of the sprint based on the progress of all the tasks) shouldn’t just be available for anyone who wants to go looking for it, rather you should almost be getting it just by being near the board. It was explained “someone should be able to ride a horse through the room with the board and get a sense of how the sprint it going”.
As always: it’s horses for courses, and you need to choose the right information display for your purpose and audience. But perhaps try to fight the urge to go straight for the bells and whistles or cramming everything into your One True Dashboard.
Some thoughts on... 