In this episode, I talk with Amanda Makulec about what it really takes to design dashboards and data products that people can understand and use. We dig into why so many dashboards fail, how designers and analysts often misjudge their audiences, and what it means to take a truly human-centered approach to data visualization. Amanda shares insights from her work leading the Data Visualization Society and from her book, including practical ways to think about context, cognition, and decision-making. We also discuss common misconceptions about dashboards, stakeholder expectations, and the gap between technical correctness and real-world usefulness. This conversation is packed with ideas for anyone building data tools meant to inform decisions, not just look impressive.
Resources
Pick up the new book, Dashboards That Deliver.
Guest Bio
Amanda Makulec is a data visualization leader who has worked with clients across the federal, nonprofit, and private sectors for 15 years. Her primary area of expertise is in public health, having worked in roles in monitoring and evaluation, health information systems, project management, and communications.
She is a sought after writer and speaker on health data visualization, including how to design effective health data graphics and how to build cross-functional data teams to support the analytical and dashboarding needs of a variety of different organizations. Her work is informed by principles of user-centered design, agile software development, and a core belief in visualizing data responsibly, particularly when communicating health information that can be so personally impactful and designing analytical tools that inform decisions about access, delivery, and quality of health care services.
Her work developing, teaching about, and leading teams to create data visualizations has extended across more than a dozen countries both global and domestic public health, including leading workshops and webinars that have reached thousands of people and keynoting events including Chart Champ and Women in Tech Summits.
She serves on the Advisory Council for the global Data Visualization Society, where she is a founding board member and served as Executive Director (2021-2024) and Operations Director (2019-2020). She co-hosts the monthly Chart Chat podcast with her co-authors of Dashboards that Deliver. She has also published articles in the New York Times, Fast Company, and Nightingale – The Journal of the Data Visualization Society.
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Transcript
00:01.88
Jon
Hello, Matt. Oh, no, wait, not Madison. Hello, Milwaukee friend.
00:05.08
Amanda Makulec
ah Hi, John. How are you?
00:06.81
Jon
oh good. I almost said, I mean, I had Wisconsin in my head, but then, you know, I immediately go to Madison. It’s just for my head.
00:13.59
Amanda Makulec
It doesn’t help when there’s two major cities that are both starting with an M.
00:14.10
Jon
Oh,
00:17.43
Amanda Makulec
And as I appear, I have heard that Camp Randall Stadium is the fifth largest city in Wisconsin when it is filled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison because of how small all the other towns are here.
00:26.62
Jon
um That’s good. I could see that. Yeah. Cause it’s probably like 80,000 at this point.
00:32.41
Amanda Makulec
Yeah, something like that.
00:33.05
Jon
Yeah. And they’re also like, both cities are like at the same latitude, like an hour across an hour separate.
00:37.78
Amanda Makulec
They are.
00:39.52
Jon
Yeah. It’s pretty good.
00:40.22
Amanda Makulec
Yeah, it’s great.
00:40.82
Jon
um How are things in Wisconsin?
00:44.80
Amanda Makulec
Wisconsin is fabulous. I love living in Wisconsin. it’s ah It’s so, you know, calm, quiet, peaceful here. And we’re getting absolutely dumped with snow this winter, which My kids are loving, so we can’t complain about that.
00:52.57
Jon
Yeah. I bet.
00:55.64
Amanda Makulec
so the snowball The snowball and snowman making potential is much higher with Wisconsin snowfall than is in D.C.
00:55.83
Jon
Yeah.
01:02.76
Amanda Makulec
where you’ve got to run out there and like catch it in the first like inch of snow and try to make a tiny little teeny tiny snowman.
01:02.84
Jon
but dc Yeah. Right. Right. Right.
01:10.01
Amanda Makulec
But it’s been great.
01:10.45
Jon
right ah And you get like a day and then it’s gone.
01:10.85
Amanda Makulec
We really like being back.
01:12.85
Jon
Yeah.
01:13.72
Amanda Makulec
ah Yeah. A day and it’s gone is basically it. Then it’s just gray slush and then it just feels sad. So I like the i like the blanket the blanket of snow we’ve got here.
01:17.91
Jon
yeah Then it’s just kind of sad. Yeah.
01:20.84
Amanda Makulec
It looks very winter wonderland-y.
01:21.14
Jon
Yeah, yeah, yeah. um Okay, so you’re out in Wisconsin now. Great new book, Dashboards That Deliver. It’s a follow-up to the big book of dashboards. um Let me ask you two questions simultaneously. First, for people who don’t know you, maybe give a little a little spiel on your bio. But then the more important question is, um how did you get hooked up with these jokers, Andy, Steve, and Jeff, to to to to to get in on ah on the second book?
01:51.16
Amanda Makulec
Great question. So first, I am Amanda. For those who don’t know me, I am a health data visualization designer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin now. But I was in Washington, DC for more than 15 years, where I helped to build out the local data viz DC community. And it was where I was when I helped to the get the data visualization society off the ground.
02:14.28
Amanda Makulec
um I was a founding board member for DVS and served as their executive director for four years. And so I’m a big fan of any way that we can build community in the data visualization space. I also probably am known for writing and talking a lot about visualizing data responsibly, especially in the context of health and healthcare.
02:30.48
Amanda Makulec
care and spent a lot of time speaking around that topic during the COVID pandemic. So it was exciting actually coming full circle with dashboards that deliver because we actually have the John Hopkins COVID dashboard as one of our scenarios in the book, which was so exciting to get to get to dive into as a public health data viz person.
02:42.78
Jon
Yeah. yeah um I want to know about the Jokers.
02:50.17
Amanda Makulec
But you want to know about the jokers and how I got connected to to the crew.
02:53.04
Jon
Yeah. I mean, i’m sure I’m sure they’re cringing when they hear that, but I’m going to stick with it.
02:53.53
Amanda Makulec
The crew. but yeah your word Your word, not mine, John, so that’s okay.
02:57.70
Jon
Yeah. Oh.
02:59.81
Amanda Makulec
ah So I actually met Andy and Steve together at the Tapestry conference in 2018. You were there too, right? Weren’t you speaking at that conference or you were at that conference?
03:13.72
Jon
Yeah, probably. Well, there was one in Nashville and one in Miami and one in Miami.
03:17.91
Amanda Makulec
Miami, yeah, that was the Miami one.
03:19.00
Jon
miami Yeah, I was there.
03:19.43
Amanda Makulec
So Miami one where ah back in the day, Tapestry, for those who don’t know Tapestry, was a great, really kind of niche, smaller data visualization conference.
03:20.28
Jon
Yeah.
03:23.96
Jon
Yeah.
03:29.27
Amanda Makulec
Tableau co-sponsored it, I think at the time. And the 2018 one was hosted at the University of Miami by Alberto Cairo and his crew there. They great speakers.
03:39.85
Amanda Makulec
i mean, I think Cole was speaking, Elijah spoke and did his third wave talk. um And they had an open call for lightning talks or Pecha Kucha talks, what they called Pecha Kucha talks.
03:49.53
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
03:50.66
Amanda Makulec
And they said they said, you know, we need some more people to do these five minute Pecha Kucha talks. And Being the I think I was five months pregnant at the time of Caspian and just like lumbering around and came to this conference and had never been before.
04:03.06
Amanda Makulec
I was like, I like to give talks. I’ll give a talk.
04:05.46
Jon
Yeah.
04:05.90
Amanda Makulec
And so I did this short little five minute talk about the mediocrity of ah medical test result data visualizations that get sent out to folks.
04:15.85
Jon
Right.
04:16.88
Amanda Makulec
and talked about like how awful some of those reports are that you’re getting bad news.
04:17.33
Jon
Yeah.
04:21.72
Amanda Makulec
And so told it from a very personal perspective in terms of my own experiences. And it’s all just like seas of red with no good kind of indication of, risk ratios for you compared to other people and the general population.
04:35.12
Amanda Makulec
And after I gave that talk, Steve Wexler, he will tell this story too, decided he’s like, I would like to know her because she talks about how to make data practical and easier to understand.
04:43.15
Jon
Hmm.
04:46.32
Jon
Yeah.
04:47.40
Amanda Makulec
And so he introduced himself to me and we had a nice chat at Tapestry. i got to meet Andy, who we may have crossed paths in the past, but met him at some of the happy hour stuff that was happening at that conference.
04:57.52
Amanda Makulec
And a little while after that, Steve reached out and invited me to go join him and Jeff as a guest on Chart Chat.
05:05.88
Jon
e
05:06.04
Amanda Makulec
And they they brought me on as a guest. We talked about some really interesting data visualizations that I think Mona Chalabi had done recently. but i think This was back in 2019. And I hadn’t realized that it was an informal audition for being a Chart Chat co-host. And if you don’t want know Chart Chat, Chart Chat came out of the first big book of dashboards as a space for Andy, Jeff, and Steve to kind of continue on the conversations they had in the book writing.
05:32.00
Amanda Makulec
And so after that first Chart Chat, I got invited to be a recurrent co-host on Chart Chat, and we’re hosting Chart Chat number 66 this month.
05:32.10
Jon
Right.
05:41.74
Jon
Wow.
05:41.80
Amanda Makulec
So we’ve kept it going. And so when the idea for doing a new book, whether it would be a version two or a follow-on to Big Book of Dashboards came up, they were kind enough to invite me to be part of the writing team and continue our collaboration.
05:44.06
Jon
Yeah.
05:54.21
Amanda Makulec
so They liked me enough to write with me as well as inviting me to chat with them every single month.
05:55.03
Jon
Nice.
05:58.68
Jon
Yeah, because the writing part is a lot more lot more of ah of a dedication to being with someone.
06:03.42
Amanda Makulec
It was, that was a, that was a two year runway, I think, from when we actually did the book proposal and got it all approved to when we actually had everything come out in print.
06:06.33
Jon
Yeah.
06:09.91
Jon
Yeah.
06:12.46
Amanda Makulec
Because collaborating with four co-authors where every one of us actually did read and give input on every single chapter, even though there’s lead authors noted on the different chapters, is and people who have strong opinions about things, ah took some time, took some time.
06:17.81
Jon
Yeah.
06:22.47
Jon
Mm-hmm.
06:25.50
Jon
Yeah, right.
06:29.18
Jon
But not only that, for folks who haven’t written a book specifically or particularly a data or data of his book that image heavy, like the part of getting the images is kind of its own universe of tasks.
06:44.15
Amanda Makulec
Yes, we have 293 images in that book.
06:48.02
Jon
Oh.
06:49.34
Amanda Makulec
And I know because I know where the folder is and I know the count because we had a ah spreadsheet tracking, you know, where where are all of the images?
06:54.52
Jon
Yeah, yeah.
06:56.10
Amanda Makulec
Like, what’s the status on the image? Do we have the right file? And it’s funny, it’s things you don’t think about, too, that it’s getting the images all in there in your draft.
06:59.34
Jon
Right.
07:04.20
Amanda Makulec
and You’ve gone through this with your layout that’s maybe in like a Word document.
07:06.23
Jon
e
07:08.24
Amanda Makulec
And then they do the layout of the book.
07:08.54
Jon
Yeah.
07:11.08
Amanda Makulec
And we gave very specific instructions and shout out to all three of my co-authors who were able to give clear guidance to Wiley saying, here were the problems.
07:11.54
Jon
Right.
07:19.68
Amanda Makulec
That happened last time where, you know, you flip open the book and you’re reading and it says figure like 2.7. And then five pages later, you finally find figure 2.7.
07:27.38
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
07:30.28
Amanda Makulec
And so it’s important, I think, as you’re thinking about the book process that the first draft and having all the images there is one thing. especially all these screenshots from different dashboards, but then actually getting them laid out in a way that makes for a good reading experience becomes an entirely separate kind of part of that process that took a lot of optimizing and sometimes rejigging kind of aspect ratios and organization of graphics and images where we could.
07:40.31
Jon
Yeah.
07:45.59
Jon
Yeah.
07:54.41
Jon
Mm-hmm.
07:56.24
Amanda Makulec
So things would fit together better on these two page spreads in this square book that we have.
08:00.02
Jon
Yeah.
08:02.46
Jon
Yeah. And my, um, my, I think it’s both of my books with Columbia, better data viz and better presentations, the charts are not numbered because I just personally liked that experience of like, okay, in the figure below or a figure on the facing page, which means the, the layout thing is much more difficult, right?
08:23.30
Jon
Cause you have to make sure when you say the image below, it actually ends up below.
08:24.50
Amanda Makulec
Yeah.
08:26.90
Jon
But what I didn’t realize is that that strategy doesn’t work for e-readers, right?
08:33.85
Amanda Makulec
No, we specifically have it.
08:34.21
Jon
Because.
08:35.99
Amanda Makulec
So our e-reading copy, if you buy a digital version of dashboards that deliver, you will be reading through basically a PDF of the exact layout. that we have in the book for that reason.
08:45.37
Jon
Yeah.
08:47.78
Amanda Makulec
Because even with kind of orienting and making sure the figures are on associated pages, a lot of effort went into that. And that would be very difficult if you were scrolling on an e-reader and realizing that everything moved around on you.
08:59.19
Jon
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, you could, if you can change the font size, if you could, know, you can zoom in and zoom out in an e-reader saying the, you know, figure three is over, is next on the next page.
09:09.43
Jon
Well, next page doesn’t mean anything in the electronic version.
09:11.59
Amanda Makulec
Yeah.
09:12.63
Jon
Anyway. Um, Okay, so let’s talk about where the examples ah came from, because my recollection is, and I think they did this with the first book, right, is ah was a public solicitation for um for examples.
09:22.81
Amanda Makulec
Yes.
09:28.01
Jon
And um and so when… When people submitted, you all went through them, selected out. You can tell us like how, you know, what that, what that was like. Did you then reach back out to people and say, you know, you made it and this is what we’re going to do. Or re said, you made it.
09:45.98
Jon
um Thanks a lot. And you’ll see the final version when it comes in print.
09:49.40
Amanda Makulec
Oh, gosh, that would be a scary thing to say to somebody about presenting their own work.
09:51.16
Jon
I would, wouldn’t it?
09:52.88
Amanda Makulec
I would imagine we would have had lots of people opt out at that point if they said, you’re using my JotForm submission as the basis for a whole chapter in the book.
09:53.37
Jon
Yeah. Yeah. I would think. Yeah. Yeah.
10:00.44
Amanda Makulec
um I think it’s probably worth saying to those who haven’t peeked at the book that the book is broken into three sections, right?
10:00.70
Jon
yeah
10:05.04
Jon
Mm-hmm.
10:05.82
Amanda Makulec
So part one is an overarching kind of process around data visualization and dashboard design, very agile user-centered. Then the second section is these scenarios. And there’s 15 chapters that are each a single dashboard and the detailed story about the process through which that dashboard got developed. And so we can dive in a bit more to look kind like what’s in those scenarios. But the third section is some kind of shorter essays on key themes and data viz right now, Gen AI and data viz, those kind of things.
10:34.58
Amanda Makulec
When we did the call for submissions, it was, you are correct, similar to what happened with the first book where a call was made for submissions for big book of dashboards.
10:41.21
Jon
it
10:44.50
Amanda Makulec
We had a much larger response this time around. I mean, Steve, Jeff, and Andy are now well-known and have a best-selling book on dashboard design, right?
10:51.52
Jon
Right.
10:53.34
Amanda Makulec
So we got a much larger response.
10:53.81
Jon
Yeah.
10:55.66
Amanda Makulec
We got upwards of 130, 150 submissions in terms of total submissions in for people pitching dashboards that they’d like to have included.
11:00.69
Jon
Yeah.
11:05.27
Amanda Makulec
We also at the same time went and said, what are the dashboards that we think should be in this book? That’s how the Hopkins one ended up in. We reached out to them directly and said, we would be really interested in having the John Hopkins COVID dashboard in this book.
11:18.31
Amanda Makulec
Just As that moment in time, something widely used, 2.5 billion page views over the life of the dashboard, like, why not?
11:20.74
Jon
Yeah.
11:23.92
Jon
Yeah.
11:25.90
Amanda Makulec
So we did reach out to some folks directly as well. But it was interesting because as when we went through the submissions, we actually spent an extra day after the Tableau conference sitting in Jeff Schaefer had an upgraded suite with like the executive suite with a big fancy room in it for us to sit in at the Hilton at the Tableau conference.
11:29.38
Jon
Mm-hmm.
11:43.93
Jon
Nice.
11:46.15
Amanda Makulec
And we sat with a computer hooked up to this big screen, into the big TV screen, going through and actually reviewing all of the different submissions and identifying kind of a first call, which ones kind of make the cut or don’t make the cut for consideration, and then talking more granularly about different ones.
11:59.43
Jon
Yeah.
12:02.92
Amanda Makulec
And before that, we had we tried to classify different submissions by topic, right? Like the first book is a lot of business-y kind of dashboards.
12:08.02
Jon
Yeah.
12:10.80
Amanda Makulec
This book has a lot more diversity in topic and type. So you have dashboards on things like healthcare analytics.
12:14.78
Jon
Mm-hmm.
12:17.47
Amanda Makulec
You’ve got things on banking. You’ve got things on KPIs. We’ve got things on professional racing teams. It’s very cool. But…
12:25.00
Jon
Mm-hmm.
12:26.14
Amanda Makulec
We wanted some diversity on types. And one of the ways in which we were going through and calling dashboards initially was looking for dashboards that actually functioned, and this is going to sound so obvious, but functioned as dashboards rather than being data visualizations built in a tool like Tableau on a panel called a dashboard.
12:47.44
Amanda Makulec
Like, you know, if you if you’re working in Tableau, you open up a a dashboard, but people will build scrolly telling pieces or really great infographics in Tableau on a dashboard.
12:47.77
Jon
Yeah.
12:55.51
Jon
Yeah.
12:57.77
Amanda Makulec
But they don’t necessarily make a great fit for a visual display of information meant to monitor conditions or facilitate understanding.
12:58.17
Jon
Right.
13:06.22
Amanda Makulec
They’re more story driven.
13:06.62
Jon
Mm-hmm.
13:07.34
Amanda Makulec
They’re more information presentation. And so that was one of the things I think that surprised us a bit going through the submissions was there was a not insignificant number that were amazing data visualizations.
13:19.31
Amanda Makulec
Like I think some of them got submitted for IIB awards and things like that.
13:19.77
Jon
Well, yeah.
13:23.38
Jon
oh yeah
13:23.35
Amanda Makulec
But they weren’t really dashboards. And because we wanted to focus not just on what is good or bad design in this book and focusing on that piece, we also went ahead and we said, do we think this dashboard or does this dashboard based on what someone filled out on the form?
13:39.61
Amanda Makulec
have a clear story of how it got built and have a clear kind of use case for how it’s being used in practice. Because people build lots of really interesting looking dashboards for open challenges or makeover Monday or whatever else that could be interesting design conversations.
13:56.19
Amanda Makulec
but they were not necessarily interesting process conversations around how a team or a person built a dashboard and then how it actually got used.
14:01.76
Jon
Mm-hmm.
14:06.98
Amanda Makulec
And so we really looked for examples that had a real story to them and really were being actively used in the real world.
14:07.25
Jon
Mm-hmm.
14:11.77
Jon
Mm-hmm.
14:14.30
Amanda Makulec
And think one or two scenarios were more prototype or template type dashboards, but most have really interesting stories that go into adoption and use
14:18.97
Jon
e
14:23.54
Jon
e he
14:23.58
Amanda Makulec
which I think goes beyond the scope of a lot of other dashboard design books.
14:27.32
Jon
Yeah. did the I’m curious about the diversity of, of um I guess, topics or sectors. Did that sort of naturally fall out of this ah decision process?
14:35.04
Amanda Makulec
Sure.
14:41.43
Jon
or or or so So you have this 150, let’s say, there’s a whole bunch of them that are just infographics or not just, but you know they’re not dashboards.
14:47.20
Amanda Makulec
Sure.
14:50.65
Amanda Makulec
Very cool, but not great for this book.
14:52.12
Jon
But not dashboards, right. So we throw those out and then you have this, you know, set less of left or whatever it is.
14:53.18
Amanda Makulec
Yeah.
14:58.87
Jon
Did you, did you all consciously say, okay, so we have, here’s a dashboard that’s, you know, public health versus, you know, business. Let’s, let’s just use the public health one because that gives us more variety or to just naturally sort of fall out.
15:09.18
Amanda Makulec
Hmm. It was so long ago. I don’t think we said no and dropped anything because we had too much of something.
15:13.78
Jon
yeah
15:18.65
Amanda Makulec
I think it kind of naturally fell out.
15:19.13
Jon
Okay.
15:20.44
Amanda Makulec
Cause I think that’s what you’re asking.
15:21.09
Jon
Yeah.
15:21.41
Amanda Makulec
Was there like a point at which we had 30, And then we’re like, oh, we’re going to drop these two because we’ve got too many business examples.
15:21.88
Jon
Yeah.
15:28.25
Amanda Makulec
And I don’t think that ended up happening.
15:28.50
Jon
Right.
15:29.85
Amanda Makulec
We had a a little bit of attrition from our shortlist based on just people like we’d one that we dove down the whole writing process and then they couldn’t get internal approval on sharing it, those kind of things.
15:30.14
Jon
Just kind of naturally evolved.
15:33.55
Jon
Mm hmm.
15:40.03
Jon
Oh, well.
15:40.99
Amanda Makulec
So we had some instances where we had some attrition there. But I think the overall makeup and kind of diversity of the different dashboards, both in design and in topic, I think worked out pretty well.
15:44.31
Jon
Yeah.
15:53.03
Amanda Makulec
The one miss I will say is we, no matter how hard we’ve tried, did not get a lot of Power BI submissions. And so I was hoping we’d have a little bit more representation from Power BI dashboards in the book, just because I think we’re associated as being people who are more connected to Tableau, but so many people use Power BI.
16:00.47
Jon
Yeah.
16:06.07
Jon
yeah
16:10.20
Jon
Right.
16:12.03
Amanda Makulec
But we didn’t get a lot of submissions despite a lot of nudging and asking.
16:12.31
Jon
Yeah.
16:15.43
Jon
That’s interesting.
16:15.55
Amanda Makulec
And I think that’s in part because we’ve seen that community, especially in the last couple of years with some of the work Shannon Lindsay and others have done to really build that community structure.
16:20.56
Jon
Yeah.
16:24.96
Amanda Makulec
i think that I’ve seen a lot more of that kind of community engagement.
16:25.40
Jon
yeah
16:28.32
Amanda Makulec
And maybe if we made that same call now two years later, we may have gotten more submissions. Who knows?
16:33.91
Jon
I mean, maybe we could have a whole conversation about the different development of communities between these different tools, but, but to this, to this point, so what share of the dashboards that are in the book are Tableau and what are some of the other tools that you ended up?
16:39.73
Amanda Makulec
Church.
16:49.12
Jon
I mean, the Hopkins thing was custom.
16:51.57
Amanda Makulec
Hopkins thing was custom, but it’s in Esri, I think. I think their front end is Esri.
16:55.45
Jon
Oh, yeah, that could be.
16:55.65
Amanda Makulec
I think so.
16:56.25
Jon
Yeah, that might be right. Yeah.
16:58.06
Amanda Makulec
um I think about a third or Tableau. About third?
17:02.07
Jon
Okay. Yeah.
17:03.19
Amanda Makulec
Maybe more, but about a third or Tableau. There’s some custom D3 type dashboards.
17:07.71
Jon
Yeah. Right.
17:08.79
Amanda Makulec
There’s some that there’s an Esri one in there.
17:09.11
Jon
Right.
17:11.47
Amanda Makulec
ah Maybe more like half is Tableau. I’m like trying to mentally map my way through all of them.
17:15.61
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
17:16.26
Amanda Makulec
I mean, the the NASA Earth Information Center is a whole kodgepodge of various different data visualization libraries and codes and types and things all aggregated together with a a wrapping kind of tool that lets them put things that were built in different spaces together.
17:16.38
Jon
Yeah.
17:23.83
Jon
yeah
17:29.77
Jon
Yeah.
17:31.86
Amanda Makulec
i am not technical enough to be able to explain that in great depth, but you ask Alex Gervich or Mark Subarau or Alaini Kostas and one of them could probably tell you more.
17:32.34
Jon
Right.
17:35.22
Jon
Yeah. mean Yeah. Yeah.
17:41.42
Amanda Makulec
But it was a good mix.
17:42.01
Jon
It is.
17:43.02
Amanda Makulec
I think it definitely veered more towards either Tableau or Customs. for the most part, and versus having other kind of bespoke data as tools like Qlik or Power BI or something else represented.
17:53.62
Jon
I was, I mean, ah for me, that kind of, I think tracks a lot of what I feel like I see, which is like in the public versus sort of the internal.
18:03.66
Jon
So it doesn’t surprise me necessarily. Cause I feel like power BI, especially is like a lot of internal stuff. Cause it hooks into Microsoft so quickly and then click as well.
18:12.34
Amanda Makulec
Sure.
18:13.23
Jon
I mean, there’s not like a huge external click community the way there is with tablet public.
18:17.55
Amanda Makulec
and Qlik is a lot of healthcare care that I think gets more complex.
18:20.12
Jon
Yeah.
18:20.13
Amanda Makulec
Like we had to do a lot of work with Lindsay Betzendahl to make sure that any representation of the Children’s Hospital Association dashboard, even where they had used like made up hospital names, everything says actually Betzendahl Hospital now on all the examples, because we wanted to make it very clear that this is not anyone’s actual or real data.
18:20.79
Jon
Right.
18:28.11
Jon
Yeah.
18:31.86
Jon
Right.
18:39.29
Amanda Makulec
And there’s a lot of kind of hashes or just placeholders instead of numbers, just to make sure that it was as masked as possible.
18:39.58
Jon
yeah
18:43.74
Jon
right
18:46.42
Jon
Yeah. um Okay. So the other thing that’s, that’s interesting, I think about this book um is it goes beyond sort of like what’s good and what’s bad. i mean, you talk about that a little bit, but it really, I think where it kind of pushes the boundaries of what the field is doing is it talks about teams. You’ve mentioned agile processes, it talks about teams and processes. So like what in your mind from that part of kind of the main takeaways that, that readers should expect?
19:17.16
Amanda Makulec
think the biggest one is that you should be spending time understanding who’s going to use a dashboard or data viz tool more broadly. You should understand who’s going to use it, how and why, before you even start building something.
19:29.33
Amanda Makulec
And that sounds so obvious to me because I think almost every good data viz class, even mean, you teach data viz classes, John. Starts with like, know your audience. You should know your audience. Think about who you’re communicating with.
19:37.79
Jon
Yeah.
19:39.38
Amanda Makulec
No duh. But dashboards, when you’re building a tool you want someone to engage with beyond just like reading the kind of key takeaway of a chart, I think has a higher bar and requires us to have a little bit more of a product mindset where we think about how we’re building something we want someone to engage with and use.
19:40.44
Jon
Yeah.
19:44.44
Jon
yeah
19:56.82
Amanda Makulec
So it’s not just about having those early interviews and conversations and mapping out a list of requirements. but engaging with those people where you can as partners, or at least engaging with their proxies as partners so that they’re giving input throughout the design process.
20:07.08
Jon
Mm-hmm.
20:11.80
Amanda Makulec
You want to have not just that early stage interview, what do you want on this dashboard? You want to ask better questions than that. But you also want to make sure you’re showing people examples. Do you prefer things presented this way or that way?
20:23.80
Amanda Makulec
Which is more analytically intuitive for you? Can I watch you interact with this dashboard the way I’ve designed it and see where you get stuck trying to answer certain questions. And by engaging with people as partners, you help to cultivate champions who are excited to use the dashboard. You help to engage users that they feel some ownership. And when the dashboard actually goes live, you’re much better suited to have wider adoption and use.
20:47.74
Amanda Makulec
So I think one piece is that piece of engaging with users. And we give specific tools and activities and points that you should think about in terms of when and how you do that. And the scenarios talk a lot about that as well in terms of how people do that in practice.
21:00.36
Amanda Makulec
I think the second piece that ah comes out really strongly in the book, and I would hope people take away from it, is the value and importance of early rapid prototyping.
21:00.76
Jon
Mm-hmm.
21:09.00
Amanda Makulec
And of spin things up, draw sketches, create initial wireframes and mockups to get the overall flow and structure right. Before you spend time kind of pixel perfecting every single thing and kind of working off of a maybe even sample data or a real data model.
21:24.27
Amanda Makulec
Oftentimes you’re modeling your data as you work through your requirements to figure out the granularity of the data and all those different things that impact performance.
21:32.12
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
21:32.34
Amanda Makulec
And I think that the third big thing I would say people should take away is that when we think about how we measure success of dashboards, measuring success is not just about speed to adoption. And I think we make the and and speed to release, right? yeah So we have all these tools that tell us how quickly we can build amazing new dashboards.
21:49.45
Amanda Makulec
And at the end of the day, it’s not about speed to getting a dashboard up and out there, so you don’t want to drag your feet for six months if you can avoid it. But instead thinking about kind of how else are you measuring success?
22:00.21
Amanda Makulec
And we talk about little s success, like the monthly active users and other kind of typical digital metrics you might get off of a Tableau server. And those are the outputs in my world of monitoring and evaluation that we might look at.
22:11.99
Jon
Yeah.
22:12.24
Amanda Makulec
But you also want to find ways to actually ask your users about how the dashboard is being used in their work and getting those kind of big S success impact measurements that allow you to say when someone says, well, we spent all this money and time on this dashboard.
22:26.60
Amanda Makulec
What did it do for us? Which is a very fair question, especially in a world that’s very enthusiastic about where can we automate away things with ai And we want to be able to say, well, we built this dashboard and not only did it save like
22:28.38
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
22:40.22
Amanda Makulec
four hours a week in manual reporting processes that someone was having to do. But it also enabled people in X, Y, and Z meetings or other spaces to immediately have access to data points they need to make such and such decision.
22:53.46
Amanda Makulec
And for me, this all comes kind of full circle back to my roots working in public health and global health, where for a very long time, until I really transitioned into more of like the tech consulting world in 2017,
22:53.89
Jon
Right.
23:06.39
Amanda Makulec
my My title was not data visualization designer. I was a visual analytics advisor. I was a monitoring and evaluation associate. I was someone focused on these data demand and use projects where data visualization and dashboard was one tool we used to help get people more interested in using data ah and more actively using that data for decision making.
23:29.56
Amanda Makulec
And so for me, that kind of question of how we measure success comes back to those pieces.
23:29.94
Jon
e
23:34.16
Amanda Makulec
where success isn’t just about counting views. I’d rather have three of the right people looking at a dashboard than 300 people casually glancing at it because they think I made a cool sankey diagram.
23:39.90
Jon
Yeah.
23:44.73
Jon
Right, right.
23:45.11
Amanda Makulec
So how do I get the right people looking at it that can actually use it and are excited to use it?
23:45.49
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
23:49.83
Amanda Makulec
And maybe that even means we’re automatically emailing them the PDF on a weekly basis.
23:54.70
Jon
Yeah.
23:55.03
Amanda Makulec
I’m on board with that. I’m like, I’m the terrible person in the world of dashboards where I’m like, whatever helps you start to use this tool more. Screenshots adapted into a slide deck, I’ll help you make those screenshots better and annotate them effectively.
24:06.74
Amanda Makulec
You want to have it emailed to you each week? Fine. You want to a self-service table as your last page in the dashboard that you can export to Excel? I’m on board as long as there isn’t significant security issues.
24:17.54
Amanda Makulec
I want to make sure we’re building tools that actively get used rather than striving only for dashboarding perfection.
24:17.92
Jon
Yeah.
24:25.30
Jon
So let me, ah so so you mentioned a few things there are that I wanna talk about. Let’s do this last one. So I think, i mean, I agree with everything you said. So this, this this linno do you want 5,000 people or the right five people? I think is a key question.
24:42.39
Jon
What in your experience, i when I talk to people about this, I think a lot of people say, well, how do I get that feedback from people? I mean, I think that’s a big question because, you know, as we all know, getting someone to just go to the dashboard or the website is hard enough, but then getting them to even like,
24:52.20
Amanda Makulec
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
25:01.56
Jon
you know, send, you know, fill out a form or something. So either from your own experience or for the folks um that you worked with in the book, what are some strategies that people use to sort of do that feedback solicitation that, you know, that to try to measure impact?
25:19.29
Amanda Makulec
So I think one is kind of the structured form approach. You can have that and make it as close to the dashboard as it can be. Don’t bury it in the documentation on page number 52. Go ahead and actually have a link on the dashboard homepage or on the landing page or even in the corner of each page that says, you have feedback for us that you want to share either of feedback and and have some ways of making that into a good data collection mechanism where first someone says, I’m here to submit like feedback or stories or something positive.
25:28.40
Jon
Yep.
25:48.16
Amanda Makulec
I’m here to submit a data request that there’s a bug or issue, a data quality problem or a design change or new feature and find ways to create structure in the form that makes it more usable, but doesn’t make it cumbersome to fill out.
25:55.14
Jon
Right.
26:01.44
Amanda Makulec
The second is honestly, if you can, going and looking at who your users are over the course of a period. That period might vary. Like when I’ve worked on USAID dashboards before where data was coming in every quarter, it wouldn’t make sense for us to go check and look at things on a weekly basis in terms of usage because the data was only being updated quarterly. So you look at it on a less recurrent basis.
26:24.44
Amanda Makulec
Look at who’s using it, reach out to people who are those kind of power users and ask them if you can have 20 minutes on their calendar to ask a few questions about it. So most people don’t like filling out forms, but they’ll talk about what that looks like.
26:34.86
Jon
Yeah, right.
26:35.96
Amanda Makulec
So have a conversation with those power users. I also think when you’re doing that analysis, it’s good to, if you had specific, maybe senior leaders in mind who’d use it, look and see who’s not on the list.
26:47.46
Amanda Makulec
And if there are people who are not using that dashboard who you expected to, especially if they were involved in the process, reach out and ask them why too, to get better feedback from an anti-pattern perspective.
26:48.53
Jon
Yeah.
26:55.48
Jon
e
26:58.24
Amanda Makulec
But I think that having kind of a clear mechanism for getting feedback with a form or other structured approach and actively pushing out and asking, don’t just wait for someone to come to you, either with those meetings where you have meetings with targeted people or you push out a quarterly email that’s like, we’re just collecting short stories.
26:58.65
Jon
yeah
27:07.80
Jon
Yeah.
27:15.45
Amanda Makulec
They just need to be a few sentences. And if you can just get someone to give you a little bit of information, you then know who you can follow up with for more details.
27:17.46
Jon
the
27:22.97
Amanda Makulec
But I always think that it’s those conversations where those kind of magical moments come out, not usually through a form.
27:23.20
Jon
Yeah.
27:29.72
Jon
Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. I would add to that. in sort of a longer term thinking, like building relationships. If you have, if you know that you’re, you know, like, like for my day-to-day job, right?
27:38.04
Amanda Makulec
Mm-hmm.
27:42.27
Jon
Like if ah if I’m leading a project where we’re doing work in the city of Baltimore or something, like building the relationships with people in the city, advocates, nonprofits, government, and and then being able to sort of like say, you know, in a year from now, oh, we’ve had this relationship.
27:51.59
Amanda Makulec
Mm-hmm.
27:57.91
Jon
We put out a new dashboard last month. Like, have you seen it? Right. And sort of like the relationship building, I think works here.
28:01.61
Amanda Makulec
Yeah. Well, and I think that when you when you talk about those relationship pieces too, I think that that speaks to how big is the user base for a dashboard. For some dashboards, you’re really kind of aiming at those five people and you know who you can reach out to.
28:09.85
Jon
Yeah.
28:12.89
Jon
Yeah.
28:13.73
Amanda Makulec
In other cases, you’re really kind of casting a much wider net, which might require a different strategy in terms of how you approach that.
28:17.46
Jon
Yeah. yeah
28:20.66
Amanda Makulec
I think also if you have a plan for when you’re going to make any enhancements or changes, and I’m a big fan for advocating for the The dashboard designer should not just be constantly making little bitty changes to dashboards.
28:21.02
Jon
For sure.
28:33.24
Jon
Yeah.
28:33.58
Amanda Makulec
A, you can break things.
28:34.02
Jon
Yeah.
28:34.94
Amanda Makulec
That’s not good. You could break things.
28:35.96
Jon
Yeah.
28:36.50
Amanda Makulec
B, takes a lot more time to QA. C, context switching is a real challenge in terms of productivity.
28:41.26
Jon
Mm-hmm.
28:42.07
Amanda Makulec
so batch all your kind of ah update ideas, prioritize them in terms of what’s going to get done and what are the features people want most, and then make those changes. And when you’re about to make changes to a dashboard in that structured way is a great time to reach out to users because you can both give them something they might want, remind them that you’re looking for input for changes to the dashboard.
29:05.38
Amanda Makulec
And but by the way, if you’ve been using it, We’d also love your stories of what’s worked well to make sure we’re not changing anything that you really like. So there’s kind of a carrot piece to that.
29:14.07
Jon
Yeah.
29:15.87
Amanda Makulec
And the closer and on internal dashboards, the closer that the data team is to being part of the day-to-day operations of whatever the business unit is or the team is, the more they’re a partner who are hearing the stories.
29:16.44
Jon
For sure.
29:28.02
Amanda Makulec
They’re going to be in the meeting where someone pulls the dashboard up on a screen, right? They’re going to be there and actually see it in practice in theory, or they’re going to see the chart from the dashboard show up in a slide deck.
29:32.38
Jon
yeah
29:38.03
Amanda Makulec
which is where I think it’s great to think of data teams as partners, not just as a service desk that someone’s going to, that then their charts and dashboards go somewhere else.
29:41.91
Jon
e A service that
29:47.10
Jon
Yeah. um The other thing I wanted to ask you about was um you mentioned wireframing and drawing as part of the process. And I think that sort of sentiment comes up a lot in in these conversations of good data viz development, which is to draw and sketch and try.
30:02.29
Amanda Makulec
All right.
30:04.20
Jon
And I think a lot of people, in my experience, kind of struggle with that a little bit because they talk about, i need to understand the data. um How do I draw before I understand that fully understand the data?
30:12.74
Amanda Makulec
Sure.
30:15.74
Jon
So in in your experience, again, either your own or with the folks that you work with in the book, like how does the drawing, the sketching, the wireframing fit into this process of really understanding the data before you can figure out what the graphs are, you know even before you can sort of lay them all out in ah and a view?
30:35.48
Amanda Makulec
Yeah. I mean, Andy has a great example story and vignette in the book that is functionally like, I drew the most perfect dashboard ever. Then we connected it to the data. And it’s like, there’s one big bar and everything else is teeny tiny.
30:46.06
Amanda Makulec
And he’s like, and it’s like, there’s no insights.
30:47.22
Jon
Yeah.
30:48.42
Amanda Makulec
The scatterplot that had this beautiful kind of correlation on it that you could see.
30:52.15
Jon
Yeah.
30:52.42
Amanda Makulec
He’s like, it’s just chaos. And so he very much said, like, you can’t wait for forever.
30:54.14
Jon
yeah
30:57.86
Amanda Makulec
to translate your wireframe into something with real data, because you may find that your data isn’t coming through in those stories the way you want it to, and you have to pivot.
30:58.30
Jon
Yeah.
31:01.14
Jon
Right.
31:05.27
Jon
100%. ah is that Yeah.
31:05.54
Amanda Makulec
it
31:05.91
Jon
Yeah.
31:05.94
Amanda Makulec
Right?
31:06.49
Jon
Yeah.
31:06.54
Amanda Makulec
So, but I think that if you spent time mapping out what kind of those initial goals and requirements are, what does the dashboard need to answer? I like user story structures where I’m like, as a someone,
31:13.56
Jon
yeah
31:17.34
Amanda Makulec
I need some kind of information in order to do something. That often gives me some clues as to either how I might structure the pages in a dashboard where each page responds to a different user story or looking at kind of the in and individual views in a dashboard.
31:29.62
Jon
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
31:33.05
Amanda Makulec
But I think that the power of wireframing especially is getting the overall information flow and architecture right first and giving you the shell that you can start to fill in.
31:40.70
Jon
e
31:43.27
Amanda Makulec
Instead of working with a blank screen or canvas when you pull up Tableau or Power BI or something else, you’re saying, okay, so here’s my kind of series of boxes. In those series of boxes, I know I need some KPIs across the top because it’s just kind of good design practice and dashboards to have some KPIs with some context on them.
32:00.50
Amanda Makulec
And then I know that one of the things they need to know is something that’s around geographical kind of information and where things are geographically. So there’s going to probably be a map here. And the more you start to kind of just map out ideas and maybe just write them, like what’s the chart type that responds to things or the boxes actually having questions, this question is going to be asked here and thinking about starting with the most important stuff in the upper left, then moving down in that kind of Z or F reading pattern.
32:14.23
Jon
Yeah.
32:28.22
Jon
who
32:28.36
Amanda Makulec
You start to create a shell that you can start to fill in with different charts or graphs that actually will make the process of building off that dashboard faster later. Now, there are some people who are super confident and comfortable in, say, Tableau, where they want to prototype in Tableau.
32:37.24
Jon
yeah
32:42.92
Amanda Makulec
And and more power to you if that’s where you want to start. But if you’re going to get stuck thinking, i can’t make that like beast worm plot or dumbbell plot because I don’t know how to make it in Tableau.
32:52.80
Jon
Yeah. Yeah.
32:54.27
Amanda Makulec
That’s where the power of actually drawing things out first comes in, because then you can go find the guidelines on how you build that chart type in your tool of choice.
33:02.30
Jon
Mm-hmm.
33:03.11
Amanda Makulec
And so I think that starting with like boxes, don’t try to start with trying to sketch the charts, because I think that that sends you down a path that can actually be really tough to do because you feel like you don’t have all the information.
33:03.58
Jon
Yeah.
33:08.35
Jon
Mm-hmm.
33:13.96
Amanda Makulec
and But start with kind of the boxes and the organization of information and the wireframe before you even get to that space of sketching charts and prototyping.
33:14.62
Jon
he
33:22.07
Jon
Yeah. um So, so to the book um you mentioned earlier, there’s these three parts process scenarios and then, and then the real world piece.
33:26.13
Amanda Makulec
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
33:32.44
Jon
um Obviously different readers are going to come to this with different experience, different levels of skill. How, like um i maybe this is a two part question, but like,
33:45.72
Jon
is this a kind of book people read cover to cover? Is this a kind of book people can drop in and drop out? Where would a beginner, where would you recommend a beginner start versus someone who’s, you know, more experienced?
33:58.42
Amanda Makulec
We debated this actually on if we as authors, did we write this?
34:00.28
Jon
Yeah.
34:01.94
Amanda Makulec
it We kind of talked about who our prototypical readers would be, right? and there was some debate about, is this a book for people who are new to dashboard development?
34:06.90
Jon
Mm-hmm.
34:11.58
Amanda Makulec
Or is this like the next tier intermediate book for people who do dashboards and want to build them and make them even better?
34:18.04
Jon
Yeah.
34:18.36
Amanda Makulec
i My perspective is that this is the book I wish I had 15 years ago, as I kind of spent a decade learning and cobbling together a lot of things from user-centered design and how to use agile approaches to manage different data projects and different pieces into the process piece.
34:35.64
Amanda Makulec
So I would say if someone’s new to dashboard design, the first section of the book, which I know it’s a lot of pages, but it’s still a lot of pictures too.
34:42.84
Jon
ah
34:43.18
Amanda Makulec
lot of pictures. There’s, like I said, 293 images in the book. um There are a lot of pictures. So I think that I would start with reading through that process piece in part because it sets you up with the language that we then use in the scenarios to describe different parts of the design process.
34:47.86
Jon
Yeah.
34:59.45
Amanda Makulec
Because in each scenario, we don’t go through and say like, Here’s the discovery phase and here’s the prototyping phase. Here’s this.
35:06.26
Jon
Yeah.
35:06.50
Amanda Makulec
We picked and chose what was relevant and interesting and was a good learning moment for each of those. It isn’t every single part of the process for every single scenario. So if I was a newer person and I was using this as a learning book, I would start there.
35:16.53
Jon
Right.
35:20.61
Amanda Makulec
If I was using this as an experienced dashboard designer, I would think about if my goal is to gain inspiration from real world examples or think about different ways to approach my design process.
35:30.89
Amanda Makulec
In which case, for the first, I would start in section two and look at the scenarios. And you could read those chapter by chapter, pick one that’s relevant. There’s a section at the start of each scenario that says specifically, here are some other similar examples from entirely different fields.
35:47.52
Amanda Makulec
So if you look at it and say, when am I ever going to make like a racing team dashboard for an IndyCar team? When am I ever going to do that?
35:54.49
Jon
Yeah.
35:55.43
Amanda Makulec
I’m not. That’s not going to be in my job description anytime soon.
35:57.56
Jon
yeah
35:58.43
Amanda Makulec
But the idea that you have some kind of map of where things are happening geographically and then associated distribution type plots that show more granular detail is actually really relevant if I’m looking at things like vaccines, stockouts and supply chain issues across a country or a region.
36:15.22
Jon
Mm hmm.
36:15.19
Amanda Makulec
And I want to see high level geographic information on ah some kind of map. and then the more distribution based information separately. And so I would suggest looking at the scenarios and looking at those correlation pieces. I also think established designers might really appreciate and enjoy some of just the foundational layout stuff that’s in, I think, chapter maybe chapter eight. I should know my chapter numbers better.
36:37.05
Amanda Makulec
But where we talk about kind of core principles of dashboard design and layout that can be really helpful, especially if you’re working on a team.
36:40.95
Jon
Yeah.
36:43.53
Amanda Makulec
And making sure you’re all kind of designing with the same framework in mind of how you lay out and approach dashboard design. And I’m not trying shortchange section three.
36:49.83
Jon
Yeah.
36:51.09
Amanda Makulec
Section three is great, but you can read those as individual essays, basically. So read it cover to cover if you want.
36:54.61
Jon
Right.
36:56.36
Amanda Makulec
But I mean, it’s a it’s a kind of chewy book.
36:58.90
Jon
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
36:59.61
Amanda Makulec
So hop around.
36:59.86
Jon
No, I mean, it’s got some, it’s got heft to it.
37:00.89
Amanda Makulec
You can hop around.
37:01.70
Jon
I mean, it’s,
37:01.69
Amanda Makulec
And I hope people like stick Post-its in it and use it as a reference book that serves them when they need it.
37:05.59
Jon
yeah. I mean, I do kind of feel like that’s the newer, um this kind of new wave of data, data of his books is less sort of cover to cover and more reference.
37:17.80
Jon
Cause I think it is more, the field has evolved. People are more experienced. So you have this opportunity now to be like, I need to work on this part of my skillset. And so that’s chapter 12 or something.
37:26.54
Amanda Makulec
Yeah. Well, and I would say, if you do skip to the second section, you could just read chapter like two that lays out the design process, and you’ll get the language that we use.
37:28.02
Jon
um
37:31.58
Jon
is it
37:35.22
Jon
Yeah.
37:36.83
Amanda Makulec
So when we talk about discovery, that’s ah that’s our way of describing that whole kind of initial section where we’re digging into user requirements and mapping mapping out the vision for the dashboard and doing all those things.
37:37.43
Jon
Right.
37:47.67
Amanda Makulec
And so when you see discovery later, you’ll know what we’re referring to, which I think is always helpful if you’re reading a book.
37:51.13
Jon
yeah i think a Yeah, I think that’s a good point because there is stuff. I mean, I’m just flipping through it right now, right? Like there’s a description of the agile software development. There’s the planner versus the optimizer. Like, yeah, just knowing the languages.
38:03.13
Jon
I mean, and also like, I think probably most people read the first couple chapters of every book and then go in.
38:07.70
Amanda Makulec
you can they can get the Anyone who wants it can get the first three chapters for free on our website.
38:12.09
Jon
Okay, so this is what I wanted to ask. So um people can get the book where you know wherever they they buy their books.
38:17.16
Amanda Makulec
Sure. Yep.
38:17.81
Jon
And obviously they should also get the first book, Big Book of Dashboards. um But what else? can They can also, you mentioned Chart Chat, so they should sign up for Chart Chat so they can watch that. Okay, and so there are three chapters they can get for free.
38:31.96
Amanda Makulec
Yeah, so the first three chapters, including the framework chapter, are all a free download on dashboards that deliver.com. There’s also a Dashboards Fan Club that was our easy catch all way to let you sign up once and be able to download extensively any resource that we publish. Right now, there are various different templates and tools to support and facilitate discovery processes, and we’ll have more of those resources being released over time. So it’s a great place to go if you want downloadable resources that go along with the book.
38:58.33
Jon
Awesome. Where else should people go? um, what else, um, should they be prepared to learn? I think you have, you have a online course coming out right soon.
39:10.20
Amanda Makulec
I do. So I’m going to be launching an online course on dashboard the Dashboards That Deliver framework, designing dashboards that deliver on Maven coming up in 2026.
39:11.45
Jon
No. Okay.
39:20.12
Amanda Makulec
So if you’re interested in getting updates on when that course and other workshops or live talks that our author team are doing, you can always sign up for our newsletter on dashboards that deliver.com and you’ll be the first to see when those signups go live.
39:20.89
Jon
Awesome.
39:33.88
Amanda Makulec
But we’d love to have folks join to go ahead and walk through and do some hands-on learning around the Dashboards That Deliver framework. you’re someone who’s thinking about how do I put this into practice and wants to have a little bit more of that engagement and conversation around how we approach building great dashboards and data tools and data visualizations more widely, would love to have folks joining that conversation.
39:45.18
Jon
Mm-hmm. isnt
39:52.68
Amanda Makulec
It’ll be a cohort-based course so that people can actually engage with each other for some peer-to-peer learning and conversation, as well as getting to learn from some of my experiences and some of the content in the book.
40:02.84
Jon
Awesome. Well, I’ll make sure to put the link to dashboards.deliver.com in the show notes. So listeners, you don’t have to memorize it. You can just click and you can go over there. Amanda, congrats on the book, Dashboards That Deliver.
40:14.05
Amanda Makulec
Thanks.
40:15.07
Jon
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
40:15.45
Amanda Makulec
And congrats to my co-authors. I know I’m sitting here alone, but I have three amazing co-authors who all deserve their followers too.
40:20.02
Jon
No, that’s all right. We don’t we don’t need to congratulate them. They couldn’t take time out of their day to come here.
40:22.90
Amanda Makulec
The Joker, the other Jokers.
40:24.22
Jon
It’s fine.
40:25.08
Amanda Makulec
but but
40:27.00
Jon
All right. It’s great to see you. Thanks for coming on the show.
40:29.02
Amanda Makulec
Always. Thanks, John.