It had forty tiles and a date picker. It did not have visitors. We tend to treat an unused dashboard as a training problem: perhaps another walkthrough, a better filter, one more reminder in Slack. But sometimes the quieter explanation is the right one. Nobody needed another destination. They needed an answer while they were already doing something else. A useful report begins with a decision someone has to make. If we cannot name that decision, adding another chart is unlikely to help.

This is not an obituary for charts. A good chart can reveal something a sentence cannot. It is a plea to stop confusing the production of information with its use. Before building the next dashboard, ask who will open it, what they will decide, and what happens afterward. If the answer is silence, save the meeting. The date picker has had a long enough career.