  Despite their ubiquity, authoring dashboards for metrics reporting in modern
data analysis tools remains a manual, time-consuming process. Rather than
focusing on interesting combinations of their data, users have to spend time
creating each chart in a dashboard one by one. This makes dashboard creation
slow and tedious. We conducted a review of production metrics dashboards and
found that many dashboards contain a common structure: breaking down one or
more metrics by different dimensions. In response, we developed a high-level
specification for describing dashboards as sections of metrics repeated across
the same dimensions and a graphical interface, Quick Dashboard, for authoring
dashboards based on this specification. We present several usage examples that
demonstrate the flexibility of this specification to create various kinds of
dashboards and support a data-first approach to dashboard authoring.
