Oversimplified: Volume 131

Dashboard maintenance, good design snippets, and having a good one

Conor Dewey

Apr 5, 2022

Hey there 👋

Oversimplified is a digest of the best links I stumble upon each week, and any new posts from me. If this is your first issue, welcome! You can subscribe with the big blue button below:

✍️ The Dashboard Maintenance Problem

More stuff being created means more stuff that can break or slip between the cracks. This post explores the “dashboard maintenance” problem more in-depth and lays out one potential approach to addressing it.

📚 The Maybe Great Idea

Tanya Reilly’s talks always seem to resonate with me. The focus here is on how teams can effectively set up processes so that employees feel comfortable proposing and moving forward with ideas. While Tanya uses RFCs at Squarespace as her example, many learnings here are also applicable for design or product or whatever-you-call-them docs.

📚 Snippets of Good Design

“Good design is often ignored and not for the reasons one might think. Snippets of good design are often invisible, being something you didn’t know you needed it.” I enjoyed these examples, and made a note to check out Objectified at some point.

📚 A Very Big Deal

If you happen to be interested in macro trends within the analytics space, this is a great one from the unmissable Benn Stancil. Could BI be commoditized as a complement to data warehouses? Based on this and other moves, it certainly seems like it’s possible.

🔗 Have a Good One

Some lightheartedness: "I love the phrase ‘have a good one’ because it's just like, whatever you're having — a Monday, an existential crisis, an incredible mushroom trip, a murder fantasy — I hope it's good.”

Food for Thought

Rules are there for a reason. You are only allowed to break them if you are a master. If you’re not a master, don’t confuse your ignorance with creativity or style. Writing that follows the rules is easier for readers, because they know roughly what to expect. So rules are conventions. Like all conventions, they are sometimes sub-optimal. But not very often. So, to begin with, use the conventions. — Jordan Peterson

Until next time

As always, if you're enjoying Oversimplified, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. If anything stood out, whether good or bad, I would love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat.

Until next time,

Conor