The best dashboards are built with their intended audience in mind. This doesn’t happen by accident. Ask yourself, who am I designing this for? Is it a busy salesperson with 15 seconds to spare for key performance indicators, or is it a team reviewing quarterly dashboards over several hours? 

It’s also important to know your audience’s level of expertise with the subject matter and data. For example, a beginner might need more action-oriented labelling for filters or parameters than an advanced user. If you don’t know a lot about the audience, start by asking questions about their priorities and how they consume data to inform the best way to present the data. Remember that you can always create more dashboards. The best approach is to start simple.