A Nexthink dashboard that nobody opens is worse than no dashboard: it creates the illusion of measurement while producing no decisions. Building dashboards that get used requires starting with the audience and the question they need answered, not with the data you have available. This guide covers how to build dashboards that become part of how your organization operates, not artifacts it ignores.
The Core Problem
The most common dashboard failure pattern starts with a tour of available widgets: "here's what we can show" becomes the organizing principle, and the result is a screen of metrics that nobody specifically asked for and nobody knows how to act on. Dashboards built this way get looked at once during a demo and never again.
The right sequence is the opposite: start with the stakeholder, identify the decision they need to make or the question they need to answer on a regular basis, then find the one or two metrics that most directly inform that decision. Everything else is noise. A dashboard with three metrics the right person checks every morning is more valuable than a dashboard with thirty metrics the right person never opens.
Audience-First Design
Every organization needs at minimum four separate dashboards: one for each distinct audience. Combining audiences in a single dashboard produces a view that's too granular for executives and too abstract for ops teams. Build these as separate, purpose-built views from the start.
Executive dashboards answer one question: is the employee digital experience improving over time, and how does it compare to baseline? Executives don't need to know about individual devices or specific incidents: they need trend lines, program-level health scores, and evidence that IT investment is producing measurable experience outcomes.
The fatal mistake is giving executives operational data. A table of devices with low DEX scores is not an executive view: it's a technician view. Translate everything into business impact and program direction.
IT operations dashboards focus on fleet health right now: what's degraded, what automation is running, and where manual attention is needed. This is the dashboard that gets checked at the start of each shift and after major changes. It should surface actionable conditions, not just metrics.
The key difference from an executive dashboard is specificity: ops teams need to know which devices are affected, not just the percentage. Surface device lists, not aggregate numbers, for anything that requires action.
Service desk dashboards focus on what agents need to handle the current ticket queue more effectively. These are often best delivered through Amplify (embedded in the ITSM tool) rather than as a standalone Nexthink view, but a queue-level dashboard gives supervisors visibility into agent performance and ticket patterns.
Keep service desk dashboards specific to the last 24–48 hours. Service desk teams operate in the present tense: what's happening now, not what happened last quarter.
DEX program dashboards track the outcomes of deliberate improvement initiatives: a hardware refresh, a software migration, an Engage campaign program, a new automation rollout. These dashboards are about change over time and whether specific programs are delivering the expected experience improvements.
This audience needs before/after comparisons more than current state. Build dashboards around milestones and initiative timelines, not just point-in-time metrics.
Technical Foundation
Nexthink Infinity provides a library of pre-built widgets for common metrics, and NQL-backed custom widgets for anything the standard library doesn't cover. Understanding when to use each determines how quickly you can build dashboards and how flexible they can be.
Common Mistakes
These are the patterns that consistently produce dashboards that look complete in a demo and become irrelevant within a month. Most are avoidable if you catch them during design.
A dashboard with 30 widgets signals that nobody decided what matters. Users scan it once, find nothing immediately actionable, and stop returning. The visual complexity signals "comprehensive" but the message received is "noise."
Fix: Limit to 5–7 widgets per dashboard. If you need more, split into separate audience-specific dashboards."Collector heartbeat rate" and "NBI score" mean nothing to a CIO. Executives disengage immediately when dashboard labels require decoding. This is the single most common reason executive dashboards get abandoned.
Fix: Rename every widget title and label using business language. "% of employees with a good digital experience" instead of "devices above DEX score threshold."A DEX score of 6.8 is good, bad, or neutral depending entirely on whether that's up from 5.2 or down from 8.1. Without a baseline and trend, any metric is an orphaned number with no interpretive value.
Fix: Every key metric should show at minimum a 30-day trend and a comparison to a baseline period. Establish baselines before launching improvement programs.Showing executives a list of specific devices with low scores sends the message "this is a monitoring tool for technicians." Executives interpret this as seeing the tool's output, not the program's results. It undermines confidence in the DEX program itself.
Fix: Executive views should contain only aggregate percentages, trend lines, and program-level summaries. Device-level data belongs in operational dashboards.If no specific person is accountable for a metric and there's no defined action when it moves out of target range, the metric is decoration. Monitoring without ownership produces reports nobody acts on.
Fix: Before adding a metric to a production dashboard, define: who owns it, what the target range is, and what action is triggered if it falls outside that range.Design Principles
Dashboards that stay relevant past the initial launch share a set of design characteristics that aren't about aesthetics: they're about how the dashboard fits into the team's actual workflow.
Design each dashboard to answer a single, well-defined question. "Is the fleet healthy right now?" is an IT ops dashboard. "Is our DEX program improving?" is a program management dashboard. They require different data and different audiences, and mixing them produces neither well.
Executives think in quarters. Operations teams think in hours. Service desk agents think in minutes. Set your default time windows accordingly: and make sure the window is obvious on the dashboard face so the audience isn't guessing whether they're looking at today's data or last month's.
A single number with no comparator requires the viewer to remember the previous value. Every key metric should show its direction (up/down arrow) and either the change amount or the comparison period. This works whether the metric is improving or worsening: direction is the signal.
If a metric has a target threshold (e.g., DEX score above 7.0 = good), show the threshold on the visualization. A trend line that sits at 6.8 communicates very differently when the viewer can see the target is 7.0. Without the threshold, viewers have no frame of reference for interpretation.
Run a 30-minute session with one representative from each target audience before building. Ask: "What question do you check the answer to most frequently?" and "What's the first thing you'd want to know if something went wrong?" These answers define the dashboard, not the tool's capability inventory.
A dashboard without a defined review cadence becomes background wallpaper. Assign each dashboard a review schedule, weekly for operations, monthly for executives,and make that review a calendar event with an owner. The review meeting is where dashboards produce decisions.
Dashboard design guidance on this page reflects practitioner experience and Nexthink official documentation for the Infinity platform. View full references →