We surveyed over 450 dashboard creators when writing Dashboards That Deliver and asked a big picture question: do you agree with the statement ‘most dashboards fail’? More than 70% of the respondents agreed, and that’s among people with a vested interest in seeing dashboards succeed.

The secret to designing a dashboard that has an impact? Start with understanding your users deeply, then design with them as partners. But where does that understanding come from?

During this talk, you’ll learn five techniques for listening to and synthesizing the feedback from your potential users into materials that can guide each decision in your design process, including:

• Discovery interviews, to learn from your users

• User stories, to focus on how someone will use the information presented

• Personas, to think beyond the data requirements

• Journey maps, to understand when your users will engage with the dashboard

• Continuum plots, to identify if you actually need more than one dashboard to reach all of your user groups

You’ll leave with practical recommendations and templates you can use when you’re diving into your next design, whether it’s a totally new dashboard or another data viz project.