The best analytics are invisible. Now, there’s a whole industry devoted to creating compelling visualizations meant to take complex, dynamically unfolding events and making them instantly comprehensible and insightful. These visualizations are beautiful but, alas, they represent a creative workaround for technology’s inability to deliver what we really want – an answer, right when we need it.

Analytical dashboards are designed to get you the answers to your pressing questions as fast as possible. No matter how well they’re designed, they have a number of important drawbacks. First, they take time to interpret, meaning they only appeal to a subset of users and personas that have the mandate to uncover insights and make strategic decisions. Second, and more importantly, they require the individual to switch away from whatever they’re working on to use them, unless the analytics application itself is the core workflow.

Source: martechseries.com
Author: Charles Holive