How well do you name your dashboards?

It is important to talk about the title of a dashboard.

In my opinion it's underestimated, and yet having an important dashboard title will get your project off to a good start.

Imagine if these movies had a different name:

• The Lord of the Rings = fantasy journey
• Back to the future = past2
• Pulp Fiction = guns
• Star Wars = Star Wars 1977

It would be less appealing, perhaps even less captivating, wouldn't it?

It's the same for your dashboard. Having a clear naming convention that is understood and used is extremely important.

This will help you prevent the following:

1. Initial Impressions: Using such poor names creates a negative impression of the efforts invested in the product's development.
2. Confusion / Misinterpretation: Users may struggle to locate the correct dashboard, or worst they might use the wrong one.
3. Poor adoption: If dashboard names are confusing or uninformative, users may be less likely to utilize them effectively, resulting in underutilization of valuable data and insights.
4. Increased Maintenance: Without clear naming conventions, administrators may spend more time managing and organizing dashboards, leading to increased maintenance costs.
5. Poor Decision-Making: If users cannot easily identify relevant dashboards due to poor naming conventions, they may rely on incomplete or outdated information when making critical business decisions.

How not to name a dashboard?

• Specific symbols such as - _ / # &
• SENTENCES IN CAPITALS
• everything in lower case
• Including the versioning into the title “v1,v2...”
  Most Dataviz BI tools now have a built-in version management function
  
• Including a date : What is true today, could be false tomorrow 
• Being too broad or common : "HR Project" or "Sales Overview"
• Being too specific : "HR Digital Recruitment of external resources from September to December 2023"
• Including "Dashboard" in the dashboard name is not necessary

Naming Convention

I use a fairly simple convention to avoid getting lost. Of course, it can be adapted to suit different business organizations, audiences and needs.

If you have any thoughts or feedback, feel free to reach out to me by answering this email.

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