The Dashboard Spy

Executive Dashboard project participants are fortunate when they have the opportunity to work with true graphic designers on the visual design portion of the dashboard. There is a real opportunity to see that design is a real discipline and that the value the visual design team is not merely skin deep, but integral to the success of the dashboard interface. Of course, graphic designers vary in skill and understanding, but you know you are in the presense of a real master when they teach you the fundamentals of their trade. When they expose the “why” of their decision making, you learn that making your business intelligence dashboard intuitive relies on understanding factors of human perception.

Let me illustrate the point with a great example from the incredible book, Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell.

In the chapter on “The Basics of Information Graphics”, the author points out a topic of great interest and value: Pre-Attentive Variables. Basically, the idea is that you have to choose your visual features very carefully because they operate “preattentively” - that is, they convey information before the user pays conscious attention.

The author walks us through a great demonstration that we replicate for you Dashboard Spy readers. Here is a series of graphics to study to understand the principle so that you can apply it to your business dashboard designs:

Look at this first figure and find the blue items. 

Assuming you’re not color-blind (and probably even if you are), you can easily pick out the blue items.

Now try it with a larger field of data items:

Still not a problem, as you can see. No matter the number of balls in total, you can easily pick out the blue ones, right? In fact, if you think about it, the time it took for the larger data set was not more than that for the first smaller set. You just look at it and see the blue ones. Instead of being a linear relationship with the number of objects, the time is not dependent on the number. That’s because this example operates on color. That’s the key, because color recognition happens at a primitative cognitive level. Your visual system does the heavy lifting for you and it works in a massively parallel manner. I bet we could show you a page full of balls and it would not take any more time to notice the blue ones.

Now, for the exciting part. Take a look at a text table.

Search through the above table for values greater than one. Not so easy, is it? But the real upshot is that if I were to increase the table size, it would take you longer, wouldn’t it? In this case, our parsing of the data values IS linear with the number of values displayed.

Now take a look at this version of the data table:

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The Balanced Scorecard was introduced in 1992 according to the Wikipedia article on Balanced Scorecards.  I’m sorry, but that’s just plain wrong. How do I know? Arthur M. Schneiderman, long time process management guru and honorary Dashboard Spy, was there when the first balanced scorecard was developed at Analog Devices in 1987. It is the world’s first balanced scorecard and it’s still in use today.

Thanks to Mr. Schneiderman, we have a insider historic account of the long and eventful scorecard journey that Analog Devices took starting in 1986. See the incredible resource: The First Balanced Scorecard: Analog Devices: 1986-1992. There are outsider accounts of this first scorecard (i.e. Harvard Business School case) but it takes insider knowledge to really tell the story that would benefit implementation specialists like most of you readers of The Dashboard Spy.

The link above will bring you to a treasure trove of narrative and balanced scorecard project artifacts. Of course, I’m always on the lookout for screenshots. Among the finds I uncovered are a series of screenshots showing the evolution of the scorecard through 5 years of iterations:

In addition to scorecard screenshots like the ones above (fully annoted with project observations, by the way), the site also offers the following:

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The Executive Dashboard is the key to driving a corporate culture of performance improvement. The red/green/yellow nature of displaying progress towards performance improvement goals is both intuitive and easily communicated. Everyone understands a KPI. To a top-level manager, each status indicator on the dashboard not only represents the underlying processes, but also is tied to a specific person that he or she manages. The use of the performance dashboard as a communication vehicle between different people involved with performance management and improvement is what makes the tool so useful.

Performance is a measure of results, but one that is abstract in nature. As an abstract concept, it must be represented by concrete events and measurable things. On top of this is the softer ”feeling” that a manager transmits up the chain via his inputs on his dashboard. An executive dashboard must combine hard measurements (surfaced automatically by the dashboarding software) and these softer communications (perhaps the managers “publish” an overall status by manually flipping red, green or yellow indicators as a communication device).

Let’s look at a Performance Dashboard White Paper courtesy of MyDials, a company focusing on executive dashboards via a “Software As A Service” model.

Their very informative paper sketches out the following Performance Improvement Framework:

As you see, the idea is that executive dashboards provide managers with the ability to pay attention to three dimensions:

• Management Focus
• Measurement Philosophy
• Improvement Methodology

 On the Management Focus axis, you want to move towards providing a true value stream that focuses on the client. Measurement Philosophy should move you towards a lean approach and the Improvement Methodology should strive towards a continous mode rather than sporadic.

Let’s look at a screenshot of one of their performance dashboards:

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While the creative aspects of marketing come to mind first when most people think about an enterprise’s marketing function, it is really the analytical aspects that guide the overall implementation of programs and allocation of funds. We all like to admire the slick deliverables having to do with advertising and promotion, but let’s all be sure to pay attention to the tracking tools necessary to make executive decisions.

Marketing programs generate a lot of data. A ton of data. I asked a Dashboard Spy reader who builds marketing KPI dashboards to send me a list of marketing metrics and got this list. He call it his “short” list!

Major Marketing Metrics Short List

For a look at an effective way to design a dashboard to surface metrics such as those listed above, let’s return to the VFX Platform demo provided by the talented team at The Dashboard Company.

As you can see from the screenshot, this is a brand performance scorecard. The text is a little hard to read in my screen grab so let me reproduce the description here:

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