Dashboard Architecture and Layout Design Questions
Focuses on designing effective dashboards that surface the right information quickly and enable exploration. Topics include logical information hierarchy, placing key performance indicators prominently, grouping related metrics, choosing appropriate visualizations for the data and user tasks, and creating visual flow that guides attention. Also covers interactive features such as filtering, drill down, cross filtering, time range controls, and parameterized views; personalization and role based views; accessibility, clarity, and minimizing cognitive load; backend considerations such as data freshness, aggregation and precomputation, query performance, caching strategies, and API design for dashboards; instrumentation, testing and validation with real user scenarios, and trade offs between flexibility and simplicity.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
You are assigned to design the first dashboard for the sales operations team that must surface monthly revenue trends, top customers, and churn drivers. Describe the concrete steps you would take to identify the dashboard's primary audience and goals, elicit and prioritize KPIs, validate requirements with stakeholders, and define acceptance criteria for launch. Include how you would capture edge cases, expected user tasks, and initial success metrics for the dashboard.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Two stakeholders request opposite dashboard experiences: one wants a dense single view with many granular metrics, the other wants a minimal executive summary. As the lead analyst, how would you resolve this conflict and propose a design that satisfies both audiences without increasing cognitive load? Include stakeholder interviews, usage-data-driven decisions, and UX patterns that support both needs.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Propose an instrumentation plan to measure how users interact with dashboards. What events would you capture (e.g., view, filter-change, drill, export, alert subscribe), what metadata would you include with each event, and how would you use this data to improve UX, identify unused dashboards, and prioritize feature work?
HardTechnical
0 practiced
In PostgreSQL, describe an incremental approach to maintain a daily aggregates table daily_metrics(date, metric_name TEXT, metric_value NUMERIC) from an events table events(id BIGINT, user_id INT, event_type TEXT, occurred_at TIMESTAMP). Provide example SQL pseudocode for detecting and processing only new events, an UPSERT (insert-on-conflict) pattern, suggested indexes, and how to handle late-arriving events or corrections without recomputing the entire history each run.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a real-time dashboard architecture that must support 10 million daily active users with a subset of critical KPIs updated in under 1 minute and broader analytics updated hourly. Specify the end-to-end architecture components (ingest, stream processing, storage, caching, API layer), scalability strategies, how you'd satisfy SLAs, and where to place pre-aggregation or materialization.
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