A Declarative Specification for Authoring Metrics Dashboards
Published at
VDS at VIS
| Melbourne, Australia
2023
- Best Paper

Abstract
Despite their ubiquity, authoring dashboards for metrics reporting in modern data analysis tools remains a manual, time-consuming process.
Rather than focusing on interesting combinations of their data, users have to spend time creating each chart in a dashboard one by one.
This makes dashboard creation slow and tedious. We conducted a review of production metrics dashboards and found that many dashboards contain a
common structure: breaking down one or more metrics by different dimensions. In response, we developed a high-level specification for describing
dashboards as sections of metrics repeated across the same dimensions and a graphical interface, Quick Dashboard, for authoring dashboards based on
this specification. We present several usage examples that demonstrate the flexibility of this specification to create various kinds of dashboards
and support a data-first approach to dashboard authoring.