Spotify recently explained its Dashboard Quality Framework, a standardized practice to ensure the accuracy and consistency of dashboards across the organization. The internal Dashboard Portal, powered by the Dashboard Quality Framework, enables users to easily search for existing dashboards across the organization.
Skyler Johnson, senior data scientist at Spotify, provided an understanding of Dashboard Quality Framework. Johnson mentioned that creating effective dashboards requires specialized skills. Acknowledging that maintaining quality standards across a distributed workforce is challenging, Johnson stated that the primary goal of this initiative was to address the challenges associated with dashboard creation and accessibility.
By integrating content from multiple tools, the Dashboard Portal eliminates the need for users to consider where dashboards should reside. Additionally, embedded dashboards are equipped with extra contexts, such as ownership, refresh dates, usage statistics, and underlying queries, providing a deeper understanding of the data.
At Spotify, both Tableau and Looker Studio empowered every Spotify employee to select the solution that best aligns with their needs, creating a tailored and effective visualization experience. Looker Studio had quick, user-friendly visualizations, while Tableau offered the depth and complexity needed for intricate dashboards.
The Dashboard Quality Framework consists of two parts: Vital Signs, an automated check for dashboard health based on API and log data, and the "Spicy Design" Dashboard Checklist, a manual evaluation of data visualization and design best practices. Dashboards receive quality labels (Low, High, or Golden) based on their performance in these assessments.
To assist the Tableau users, Spotify developed a service for creating and managing Tableau extracts. This service utilizes a SQL scheduling tool that enables the scheduling and execution of batch data workflows in Google BigQuery. It also generates and publishes Tableau .hyper files for use in dashboards on Tableau Cloud. These workflows execute BigQuery SQL when dependencies are met and offer several benefits, including faster processing, increased data loading capacity, and easier editing due to .yaml-based SQL storage.
Source: Unlocking Insights with High-Quality Dashboards at Scale
Additionally, Spotify provides dashboard owners with detailed analytics about their dashboards. These insights include metrics such as the number of active users, weekly retention, user demographics (by organization or job family), and the ability to easily communicate with users via email. This empowers owners to make informed decisions about their dashboards, such as promoting them to new audiences or deprecating underutilized ones.
There was an interesting discussion on HackerNews about Tableau's relevance. The Data Visualization community actively participated in the debate, with a former Tableau champion highlighting rising license costs as an impediment to wider adoption. Despite positive feedback on the dashboards themselves, usage remained minimal, with only one recalled instance of a data visualization directly influencing a decision.
In another thread discussing PowerBI as a Tableau alternative, a HN user elaborated on why they considered PowerBI superior.
In conclusion, the Dashboard Portal serves as an internal site offering a searchable catalog of all published dashboards at Spotify, encompassing both Tableau and Looker Studio.
Furthermore, Johnson mentioned that Spotify's robust approach to dashboard creation and management demonstrates a commitment to data democratization and informed decision-making. These sophisticated tools and frameworks ensure that every dashboard is both visually engaging and a powerful source of actionable insights.