Dashboards love gold. A smoothed retention line on a dark background is a handsome object. We have sat with teams who framed such a line in a quarterly letter while the warehouse showed that returning people were a different, smaller set than the line implied.
The empty room is usually a definition. “Returned” meant “opened the app,” including a crash-restart and a push that was dismissed. The people who completed the job the product claims to do were fewer, later, and less photogenic on a curve.
We do not ban beauty. The Annfield rooms are deliberately handsome. We ban beauty that substitutes for a denominator. If you cannot say who is missing from the gold line, you are decorating.
A practical test we use in sittings: print the chart without colour. If the argument still stands in black type — cohort size, window, identity, exclusions — keep it. If the argument was the gradient, rewrite it before the next board.
This is why our site looks like a salon and our papers look like ledgers. The atmosphere is for visitors. The work is for the number you are willing to read aloud.