Displaying Excessive Detail or Precision

Dashboards almost always require fairly high-level information to support the viewer's need for a quick overview. Too much detail, or measures that are expressed too precisely (for example, $3,848,305.93 rather than $3,848,305, or perhaps even $3.8M), just slow viewers down without providing them any benefit. In a way, this problem is the opposite extreme of the one we examined in the previous sectiontoo much information rather than too little.

The dashboard in Figure 3-6 illustrates this type of excess. Examine the two sections that I've enclosed in red rectangles. The lower-right section displays from 4 to 10 decimal digits for each measure, which might be useful in some contexts, but doubtfully in a dashboard. The highlighted section above displays time down to the level of seconds, which also seems like overkill in this context. With a dashboard, every unnecessary piece of information results in time wasted trying to filter out what's important, which is intolerable when time is of the essence.

Figure 3-6. This dashboard shows unnecessary detail, such as times expressed to the second and measures expressed to 10 decimal places.