Design an Operations Dashboard for Same-Day Delivery Station Performance

Goal

Create a real-time dashboard for a delivery-station manager to monitor and act on same-day performance. The station processes 50k+ events/day. The dashboard must surface bottlenecks, SLA risks, and quality defects quickly, and support drill-down by route/zip/courier.

Requirements

• Specify exact metrics and definitions (e.g., on-time dispatch %, backlog by hour, courier utilization %, SLA risk by route, defects per million orders).
• For each metric, choose a visualization (e.g., line with 95th percentile bands, stacked bar with running total, box plot for route durations, map heatmap) and justify the choice using distribution shape, seasonality, and decision speed.
• Include:
  1. Layout: top-level KPIs, time-series panel, drill-down by route/zip/courier.
  2. Interaction design: time brush, slicers, anomaly annotations.
  3. Alert thresholds and when to use absolute vs relative deltas.
  4. Validation plan: task-based usability tests, decision latency, false-alert rate; and guidance to prevent misleading visuals (dual-axis pitfalls, truncated axes, Simpson’s paradox across zips).
• Data volume: assume 50k+ events/day; explain aggregation to keep the UI responsive while preserving tails (e.g., pre-aggregations, tiles, quantile sketches).