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From a simple excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of Business Intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in BI reporting and analysis.

An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming "must-haves" for all enterprises. Easy-to-use by business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, BI dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.

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"Dashboards by Example" is a business intelligence blog dedicated to showing you actual examples of do's and don'ts of dashboard design. Study examples of enterprise dashboards, scorecards and other business intelligence interfaces implemented by the world's top organizations.

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Scaring Digital Dashboard Users with Misleading Error Messages

Enterprise dashboard users drive their businesses via the monitoring that they do with their business dashboards. Usability and usefulness are the deciding factors when it comes time to deem the dashboard a success or not. User-friendliness is always the main objective. I was reminded of this by a recent online experience:

The Dashboard Spy practically lives on his cell phone and uses Cingular’s online account maintenance function. It is laid out in a dashboard style presentation as you can see from the screenshot below.

Account management dashboard

I logged into the account, looked around and decided to go to view usage metrics for my account. To do so, you have to provide your credentials again, which I did. I promptly got the following screenshot and almost fainted:

Misleading Error Message

My first thought (and second and third thoughts!) was that my account was closed! After all, that’s what it says doesn’t it? Actually no, it meant that “My Account”, as in the section of the application called “My Account” was closed. My account was actually ok. “My Account” was down for maintenance? Is that stupid or what?

This is a classic type of GUI Blooper. Have you read the great book called GUI Bloopers: Don’ts and Do’s for Software Developers and Web Designers?

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What do you think about this dashboard post? Please leave a comment. Your opinions are valuable to the entire business dashboarding community.

2 Responses to “Scaring Digital Dashboard Users with Misleading Error Messages”

Robert Banghart Said on February 10th, 2007 at 7:32 am quote
Hi The Dashboard Spy:

I subscribe to your blog and read it in RSS Bandit.

As long as I was getting full feeds I read every post. Now that I only get partial feeds I have pretty much stopped reading any. When I stop reading most of the posts of a blog I subscribe to, it is my norm to delete the feed within a relatively short period of time.

I don’t know if I am the majority of your readers or not or even if I am a member of your target demographic. I just know that The Dashboard Spy has become a lot less enjoyable for me.

Please consider reinstating full feeds.
admin Said on February 12th, 2007 at 4:33 pm quote
Fellow business intelligence buff and dashboard enthusiast, thanks for your note. I understand your concern and have restored the full feed feature. I had gone to summary feeds for search engine optimization reasons, but am willing to forego that in light of your request. Regards, The Dashboard Spy.

Last Modified: Friday, February 9th, 2007 @ 22:22

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 4:25 am and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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"Dashboards By Example - BI Dashboard Samples" is the theme and mission statement of this blog. We salute the Dashboard Spy in the field - those business users, project managers, IT executives, application designers, business intelligence experts, analysts, coders and subject matter experts who are on site creating this exciting and new "face of BI". Your business intelligence dashboard can go by many names - performance dashboard, executive dashboard, business dashboard, balanced scorecard, KPI metric summary, enterprise dashboard, bi dashboard, corporate dashboard. Whatever we call it, we believe that the at-a-glance visual approach is the key to user-centric design. Let's learn from each other's dashboard examples and continue to increase the level of usability and usefulness.

We strongly believe that the more dashboards you study, the more adept you will become at choosing correct design solutions for your company. "Learn by Example" is not just a motto - we take it literally, hence the name "Dashboards by Example". So take every chance you get to view examples of BI interfaces. As a matter of fact, take a second now, and study this dashboard example.

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The Dashboard Spy wants your dashboards!! I've collected over 1000 screenshots of business intelligence dashboards and scorecards for Volume 1 and now need you to send me the next 1000 dashboards for Volume 2. Email me at info at dashboardspy.com and tell me about your dashboard. Send me images, notes, technical details, business rules, metrics, KPIs, anything that you think your fellow Dashboard Spies will have an interest in. Keep this library of dashboarding resources going!

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