How do you make an average easier to interpret in a dashboard?
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For the illustrative values 10, 11, 12, 13, 54, the mean is 20 and the median is 12. A single headline number hides that distinction.
Would you show a small distribution chart next to the summary, or expose the extra detail on demand? What design has worked for readers who are unfamiliar with statistics?
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Lead with the median and show the mean beside it in smaller text only when the two are far apart. Most small business owners I work with read one number and move on, so the headline has to be the honest one. A thin strip of dots under it beats a histogram, because people spot the one outlier without needing to know what a distribution is. Then one plain sentence, like "one large order pulled the average up", does more than any tooltip.