Bowen Liu

Nobody tells you when they stop using your dashboard. They just stop. There’s no email. No feedback session. The dashboard keeps pulling live data. The widgets keep updating. But the people it was built for have quietly worked around it. I’ve seen this pattern hundreds of times. And the frustrating part is that dashboard abandonment is almost always predictable. There are specific signs, usually visible before the dashboard is even shared, that tell you exactly what’s wrong and what to fix.

Between 60 and 80 percent of business dashboards go unused or underused. A Gartner survey found that 74 percent of executives don’t fully trust the dashboards they’re given. These aren’t numbers about bad software. These are numbers about bad design decisions.   I've built hundreds of Smartsheet dashboards. The dashboards that get ignored almost always fail for the same five reasons. Once you understand them, fixing yours takes less time than rebuilding from scratch.

Most dashboards default to reports because that’s what Smartsheet makes easy out of the box. Reports pull data, widgets display it. But as the workspace grows, this approach creates two issues. First, maintenance scales linearly. Every new metric means a new report with its own filters, configuration, and potential breakpoint. A dashboard with 15 metrics depends on 15 separate reports, and any one of them can silently fail. Second, reports can’t be calculated.