Designing Tableau Dashboards in the Age of Digital Distraction
Somedays, I wonder when the internet became a massive park dedicated to billboards. Call me old, grumpy, or whatever else you must, but these bits and bytes have become far less hospitable.
via GIPHY This is exactly how the internet feels.
Take reading the news.
A trip over to CNN (try it for yourself) merits your own personal tour of Dante’s inferno in less than 20 seconds.
Ads that flicker, popups that wait – yes, they wait – for you to scroll and ads in between – some which randomly start talking. It feels like there’s more content than there is. The actual content (you can see it on the right) is just not worth the effort it takes to reach the article.
And this is intentionally induced fatigue. Grocery stores do it and we load our carts like zombies. The internet does it and we become zombies that click, scroll, and like forevermore.
This intentionally-induced fatigue has a name – decision fatigue. Wear down someone with enough decisions and you get what you want.
Richard M. Restak loves this topic. He has a whole book on how this type of information is reshaping our mind. To combat it, we develop shorter attention spans that work to either tune out or quickly switch around to all of these attention zombies. The downside: it becomes harder to singularly focus, which makes deep reading harder and magazine skimming easier. This is a widely recognized phenomenon with other books (such as Reader, Come Home and The Shallows) dedicated to it as well. It also adds up to decision fatigue, analysis paralysis, and the do-somethingnothing-about-it malaise.
You might feel some of this, but it’s been less clear. Maybe you go home and instead of cooking dinner, you find an app on your phone that brings you food. It’s one less task, one less decision in a myriad that you’re already tired of making. Maybe you zombie out in front of a TV. Maybe it’s growing hostility to people who ask you to make a decision. It’s a slow, painful burn that leads to implosion.
We do this with our dashboards as well. We ask our users to distill the information and to make decisions. Are there ways we can ease that slope? Well, maybe.
I blame old school BI for increasing the cognitive load. Granted, most of this occurred before the internet went hostile (yes, I remember Geocities). I spent eons making reports just like this and printing them out. Then we had meetings and someone sat there, circled some numbers, and we had our marching orders for the week. The problem was Texas and Utah with appliances. Go, go team! (But, isn’t there…oh, never-mind.)
When we got more sophisticated, it may start to look like this…
Part of this stems from others (usually senior management or higher) wanting to elicit a specific behavior – usually a jump to fix things. The challenge? We go back to our overloaded brain and decision fatigue.
Color can certainly get attention, but when there’s too much color, we start trying to look elsewhere for patterns – maybe it’s shape, maybe it’s space. For some people, this much hyperactivity in patterns can trigger even worse responses, such as migraines or a complete loss of attention and a failure to perform the desired task. Score 2,321 Attention Zombies, me zero.
So, how do we get attention in an already attention-starved world?
The answer will surprise you!
[Insert tantalizing clickbait-worthy photo here]
(Insert paragraph of filler here to up time on page rankings.)
Calm spaces help us focus our attention. For dashboards, this means the opposite of what our managers seem to want.
Take for example this version.
With one exception, the charts selected are the exact same. The colors are wildly different. I’m still calling out the problem areas. What I’m not doing is over-cuing the additional decisions (what’s medium-good vs good?). Things are marked as bad or good. I’m also not double-encoding how good and bad things are. Color marks the binary (good or bad) and bar length lets the end user see how much. I’m trusting the end user to read the charts.
I’ve also told them more explicitly where action is needed – click on the Fix Bad Stuff chart and magic happens. Our colorful zombie dashboard required this, but in a far more punitive fashion. Let’s click and see.
You won’t believe what happens next!
I’m amplifying the effect with my dots. They don’t have to be there, but they help facilitate seeing how many times something goes negative. From this, I can see tables are a monthly headache most of the time. Just maybe, since I’m not overwhelmed, I might do something about it.
Isn’t this too boring?!
Boring is the new sexy, kids. IKEA makes a living off furniture designed to be innocuous. And Marie Kondo became an icon in part because people are tired of the chaos, so they’re willing to part with 75% of their possessions (not here, kids).
As we become more overwhelmed, these calmer spaces will be interesting in that they’re not over the top. Who knew absence could be a selling point? Have you noticed this blog is ad-free? It’s not because I’m generous, but that I want to be able to visit it without losing my mind. Hopefully, you like it too. Otherwise, I’ll design more zombie ads.
And now, a message from our sponsor!
No kittens were harmed in the making of this post. This is ad sponsored content in that I made images of the ads and no real product exists. The ads are there simply to highlight how obnoxious reading has become. Maybe someday, we’ll stop being cruel on the internet.
[Insert gallery of clickbait here. Bonus points for peeled grapes masquerading as eyes or something else equally disgusting.]
Random takeaways & thoughts since you made it this far. Serious kudos to you for that.
- Color is probably one of the worst ways to cue people. Why?
- We don’t all see color the same way. Yes, colorblindness is one reason. But so are chromosomes, as red sits on the X chromosome.
- Color also scales logarithmically. Do we all agree on the differences? Nope. Take a look at Just Noticeable Difference studies.
- Monitors also vary widely in how they display color.
- Semantically, we don’t all agree on the significance of colors. Red is not ‘bad’ in every culture and some companies like to use it as one of their primary brand colors. Do you really want to use a key brand asset that way?
- Brains vary widely in excitability and methods of pattern matching, up to and including a pokémon zone. Reduce load and cuing for a more consistent response.
- We evaluate a space for welcomeness in the first 2 seconds. THEN we decide our feelings about it and how we want to interact with it. Sometimes, it doesn’t even take 2 seconds, as bounce rates show.
- This last point was eaten by zombies. It was probably too much anyway.
