Intelex reporting7 min read

Building Intelex dashboards people actually open

A dashboard nobody opens costs more than one that was never built, because it goes on being cited in meetings as evidence that the organization can see its own data. The usual origin is a request for "a dashboard" that nobody narrows, and a page that ends up carrying every chart mentioned in the room. It loads slowly, answers no single question well, and a month later the only person opening it is the administrator who built it.

So the useful order of work is: decide whose question the page answers, decide how much it has to load, then check that the viewer's location and permissions will let it show them anything at all. The last of those is invisible from a corporate login and is normally discovered by a site user reporting an empty page. Intelex dashboards are quick to build and awkward to retire, which is why the order matters more than the click path.

Build for one audience, not three

The fastest way to kill a dashboard is to average three audiences into one page. They want different things and give the page different amounts of time.