I was looking at some famous analytics or dashboards like Intercom, Google Analytics or Facebook Analytics and I noticed that none of them are optimized for mobile devices.
Are there any practical reasons that I'm not aware of?
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1UI elements like geographic maps (e.g., in the Geo report in Google Analytics) are really hard to do well on mobile. Essentially all you can do is shrink them.– gpgpgpMar 31 '18 at 5:13
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I think there are a couple of reasons for this:
- Existing convention - most dashboard designs were created back in the days when desktop applications were the most prevalent, so the layout tends to be for wide screens with lots of space.
- Application - a lot of the dashboards are used for complex analysis that involves sitting down and looking through a range of different 'widgets' in order to make a decision so it is not suitable for the mobile type of use cases.
- Design maturity - most of the dashboards are not designed to provide the type of data that allows the user to make decisions at a glance, instead using widgets that provide unnecessary distractions from the actual information. Infographics and Data visualization is a specialized field of design, and many interface designers are simply not knowledgeable enough to come up with suitable solutions.
There may be other reasons but I think big data and business intelligence have not yet moved into a phase where the emphasis is on data presentation and decision making rather than aesthetics. If you look at the scientific field where they have been working with very large/complex datasets for a long time already you'll see many examples of elegant presentation of information for specific or specialized purposes.
As a former scientist now working in UX design, I am still waiting for IT companies to catch up...
answered Apr 3 '18 at 8:11
