Super glad that this is on the frontpage. Dashboard design is probably the single biggest thing that analytics companies overlook when building product. It took us nearly 5 iterations to get our dashboard to a decent point.

What's worst is when offering free trials of an analytics product and then realizing that all freemium customers engage with a dashboard once, and then dropoff forever. Event tracking and various stages of a/b testing can be dangerous because they steer engineers to local minimums in designing a product.

Having a logical understanding of every element of the dashboard is the best way to approach the design.

Great post, we need more resources like this out there.