Dashboard designers often complain that “my users don’t even know what they want”. This isn’t a reasonable complaint, though, since it requires a great deal of skill to figure out what type of information displays will be most helpful to users, and we can’t expect users to have those skills. We, as dashboard designers, have to bring those skills to the table.
Read moreRemembering Charles Assey
In the before-times, I taught workshops in over a dozen countries and, without a doubt, the most interesting and beautiful one was Tanzania. Those workshops were organized by Charles Assey, a management consultant and senior advisor at the Bank of Tanzania.
Charles passed away on June 11th from a long-term illness. This news hit me quite hard since Charles was one of the most remarkable people that I’ve ever met. More than just a brilliant management consultant, Charles had an almost shocking amount of integrity and was one of those rare people who had both the ability and the genuine desire to make the world a better place. This is probably why he was well-connected and admired among global experts in reporting and performance measurement.
Charles always had the courage and selflessness to downplay his illness and deflect any concern about it, and it was devastating to learn that it caught up with him. In a year with so many losses, this one stands out as particularly painful and unfair.
The (Scary) Power of Data Storytelling
Much has been written in recent years about how powerful data storytelling can be, and that’s certainly true. As the saying goes, though, with great power comes great responsibility. Someone who’s great at storytelling is, almost by definition, also great at suppressing the audience’s ability to think critically about what they’re hearing. If we get carried away and start crafting the data around the story instead of the other way around, great storytelling makes that harder for audiences to notice.
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