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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.
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:
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
The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog
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2 Responses to “Scaring Digital Dashboard Users with Misleading Error Messages”
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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.
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.