is a thing. I’ve experienced it first hand! Before Agoda, I would’ve told myself that there’s no such thing. But after Agoda — well now I know there is too much of a . Dashboard fatigue real good thing At Agoda, we liked to . We were by . But how much is too much? In this post, I’ll talk about my experiences at Agoda to do with Dashboards and data. Say, for example, a dashboard monitoring sign ups — your KPI (Key performance indicator) — do you look at it every day? When does it stop becoming relevant and start becoming something you don’t care about? What about if I added four more dashboards about other monitoring KPIs? Would they all still be relevant? Would you be looking at them every day? experiment driven data Part I — New and Shiny When I first joined the Agoda Homes team, we were a and were building it from scratch. We because our was to . Just a side note: if you’ve ever signed up with Agoda Homes to list your Home (like Airbnb), that was built by my team. And then we finished. But now we needed to find a way to display how many sign-ups we were getting a day. We should build a dashboard. Most other teams have them! So, we used a platform called and made our dashboard to show . new product didn’t have dashboards KPI build the onboarding process Grafana sign-ups over time In the first few weeks — we were all very and . How many sign-ups did we have yesterday? How many today? Wow, it’s ! Our product is . Awesome! This dashboard was displayed on TV hanging on a wall. Agoda has several TVs around each team so you can always glance at your dashboard to see how your product is performing. We were, of course, very proud. excited interested increasing working Part II — Add Add Add It wasn’t just enough to know how many signs ups we were doing. As we’re a developer team, we also needed to understand our product is performing regarding . What are working and what is working ? What is the ? When do you put the — the point at which your application is first usable? Where do users ? How many users ? How many users ? how speed APIs fast slow First Meaningful Paint critical mark drop off in the funnel add photos edit their properties So you can already see, we were adding a lot of dashboards. These weren’t all added at once, but every time we added a new feature, we usually thought about how we can add or improve our dashboards. There was a lot we were monitoring. And it eventually got too much. Having your TVs flick through five different monitoring pages makes you switch off and stop watching. What Happened Next This is something that happen — but did. We didn’t put alerts on our dashboards because we were would be it. The Product Owner thought the development team was monitoring it. The development team thought that person X and QA were monitoring it. Person X believed that the rest of the team was monitoring. Etc. Etc. There is no one to blame but ourselves as a collective. shouldn’t so sure someone monitoring What happened was that one day our sign ups just dropped. No one noticed. No one reacted. It wasn’t for another couple of days until finally, someone saw the odd trend in our dashboard. We had dashboard fatigue. We were no longer paying attention to all the data we were collecting. It was overwhelming. We fixed the bug — but probably lost a couple of customers in return. Advice for Future Me Concentrate on having one focused dashboard that’s as simple as possible. Colours representing states makes your life easier and means that the dashboard can be understood at a glance. Avoid bar graphs and having dashboards too detailed (unless they are for following up on a problem). Add alerts for when something goes seriously wrong. Originally published at www.alexaitken.nz on August 6, 2018.
