Curate your way to clarity: How to curate your Lightdash instance for better, faster insights

At Lightdash, we use Lightdash a lot. Like our users, we rely on Lightdash to be the source of truth when it comes to answering data questions. We have hundreds of saved charts, a bunch of dashboards, and many one-off links floating around in Slack.

Unsurprisingly, with so much content, it can sometimes be hard to find what you’re looking for. What was that saved chart called again? Which dashboard was the one about the Sales KPIs? Which of these charts was made by the data team?

The effectiveness of a BI tool still depends a lot on how well it’s curated, managed, and maintained. It can become a disorganized mess pretty quickly, which can cause delayed reporting, inaccurate data, and incomplete analysis. Not an ideal scenario to get yourself into.

So, we want to help you avoid this BI mess and instead, guide you through some best practices for organizing your Lightdash instance - let’s help you Marie Kondo your BI. We'll cover these top tips:

• Use projects to organize data coming into Lightdash
• Use spaces to organize content in Lightdash
• Use pinning to highlight important content on your homepage
• Use clear names and add descriptions to make it easier to find things
• Use Usage Analytics to track how successful your project curation has been

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Use projects to organize data coming into Lightdash.

In Lightdash, projects and spaces are the building blocks for organizing your BI content. You can imagine the structure of a Lightdash instance looks a bit like this:

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Each project connects to a data source and dbt project (and the associated models, metrics, and dimensions in that dbt project).

You should create a new project when you need to separate what data is available to different users.

For example, at Lightdash, we want to split out access to sensitive data that is PII (personally identifiable information) and not. So, we have two projects: Lightdash Analytics and Lightdash PII.

Our Lightdash Analytics project only connects to tables without PII and our Lightdash PII project connects to our tables that have PII data. This lets us split out the access to sensitive data so only a select few users get access to it. It also pushes us into the good habit of doing almost all of our analyses using non-sensitive data so that we’re only using sensitive data when it’s absolutely necessary!

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Use spaces to organize content in Lightdash

Spaces are collections of saved charts and dashboards that are all related to a specific theme or team. They make organizing your content in Lightdash more clear, secure, and collaborative. They also make it easier for the team to find the content and insights they need.

For example, at Lightdash, we have spaces for each of our teams and personal spaces for organizing more ad-hoc charts and dashboards.

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You can use spaces to manage permissions to content as well. For example, if you have Finance reviews that you only want to share with certain members of your team, you can make a space with Restricted Access to limit the users who can view it.

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Use pinning to highlight important content on your homepage

Think of pinning like creating shortcuts on your desktop. Pinning allows you to highlight important information on your homepage, making it easily accessible. You should pin spaces, dashboards, or charts that are important to your organization or things you want everyone to see when they first open Lightdash. Examples of content to pin to your homepage might include a KPI dashboard or a "Key company insights" space.

To pin a saved chart, dashboard, or space to your homepage, just click on the three-dot-menu beside the item, then click "Pin to homepage". This will surface the content on the home page, making it more visible and easy to find.

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Use clear names and add descriptions to make it easier to find things

Both clear names and descriptions are important parts of a well curated BI project. They give context and clarity for your business users, helping them navigate and understand the content faster. A good name should give a general understanding of the content, and a well-crafted description should offer more detail and explanation.

When you’re naming and describing your content, we’d recommend focusing on these things:

• Choose a descriptive and concise name that reflects the content's purpose. A great tip here is to name saved charts as questions! For example, “How many weekly active users are there?”. Normally, saved charts answer a single question, so what better way to describe the purpose of a saved chart than by using the question it’s answering as the title.
• Explain the purpose of the chart or dashboard in the description. For dashboards, we recommend including questions that the dashboard answers and teams that this dashboard is particularly useful for. For example, the marketing KPI dashboard could have a description like: “Overview of our marketing performance against key metrics. Useful to answer questions about customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, and click-through-rate on our biggest campaigns.”
• Provide any necessary context or background information. This one’s especially important when it comes to building dashboards and charts related to experiments or campaigns. For example, if you ran an experiment, you should include information like the total number of users in each group, the different treatments in the experimental groups, and the time when the experiment started and ended.

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By crafting clear, concise names and descriptions, you empower your users to navigate and understand the content more effectively.

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Use Usage Analytics to track how successful your project curation has been

To make sure that your Lightdash curation efforts are paying off, it's important to track the success of your content. Luckily, in Lightdash you can use usage analytics to help you understand how your users are engaging with your charts, dashboards, and spaces. By monitoring these metrics, you can identify trends, areas of interest, and potential improvements to better serve your users.

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Some ways to track success with views and usage analytics include:

• Evaluating the number of views for specific charts and dashboards to identify popular content or areas of high interest
• Analyzing usage patterns over time to uncover trends, such as increased engagement with particular content or topics
• Identifying low-usage content and deciding if it needs to be updated, improved, or removed
• Gathering feedback from users to better understand their needs and preferences, and to identify opportunities for improvement

By keeping a close eye on views and usage analytics, you can continue to refine and optimize your Lightdash instance, making sure that it delivers valuable insights to your users.

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Implement these top tips in your own Lightdash instance and curate your way to clarity!

Those are our top tips for improving how your Lightdash instance is organized. We hope you’ve got the itch to go and curate your instance a bit after reading this and you feel empowered to do that with the features we talked about. Just to summarize, these were the tips we covered:

• Use projects to organize data coming into Lightdash
• Use spaces to organize content in Lightdash
• Use pinning to highlight important content on your homepage
• Use clear names and add descriptions to make it easier to find things
• Use Usage Analytics to track how successful your project curation has been

Now go forth, and curate your way to clarity!

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Any and all feedback is welcome :)  You can open an issue in GitHub, or come chat to us in the Lightdash Slack community!