The Dashboard Spy

Massive systems produce massive amounts of metrics. The challenge of business intelligence is to figure out how to slice and present the data in ways that benefit the user rather than confuse them. We’ve all seen situations where users get inundated with out-of-context numbers that do worse than confuse - they mislead and alarm.

The answer lies in information architecture, of course. Categorization of the information must be done from the user’s point of view.

New York City has gone out of its way to organize the performance metrics available to track the performance of its many agencies. The city has organized its KPIs by what they call “themes”. A great idea. Here is the diagram they display to people interested in NYC citywide performance metrics. They ask you to indicate a theme, or area of interest as follows:

Nothing to it, you say. “It’s obvious”. Well, if it were obvious, why do we still see those dropdowns with hundreds of values to choose from?

By using navigation to split users and find out their intentions, we can limit field choices to a reasonable level once they get to the data request form page.

Here is the link to the New York City Citywide Performance Reporting application.

The Google Sites platform is now available and all of the business dashboard community should immediately explore this new option for BI dashboarding. At least for quick mockups and prototypes, although you’ll find them quite suitable for standalone business dashboard applications. The Google Sites Dashboard is part of the Google Apps offerring. That means it is available at no cost. Dashboard Spy readers - did you hear that? A free, powerful dashboarding tool from Google is now available.

Think of Google Sites as an instant collaboration and community platform. It’s very Sharepoint in it’s functionality and approach. Check out Google Apps and open an account through this link:

Now, let’s look at the functionality and screen templates available from Google Sites. Here are some screenshots of various layouts including the dashboard page type. Remember, the idea is collaboration so think wikis, blogs, sharepoint, etc.

Tags: Google Sites Dashboard

Business intelligence vendors must be counting time in dog-years because things are happening awfully fast in this space. As we predicted here at The Dashboard Spy, 2007 saw some industry-shaking acquisitions by the major BI dashboarding players. This resulted in Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM moving from owning collectively less than 25% of the market to now controlling over 65% of the space.

Let’s take a look at the famous Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence for both January 2008 and January 2007 to see how the BI dashboard space has mutated so quickly. Excuse the scribbling I did on the Magic Quadrant diagram. The January 2008 cutoff date meant that the diagram does not show the SAP/Business Objects acquisition. Go to the Dashboards by Example post here to see an original 2008 BI Magic Quadrant chart.

Between January of 2007 and Feb of 2008, we saw the following consolidations through acquisitions by large BI players:

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The recent post on Dashboards By Example on creating WebSphere Portal Dashboard Mashups using Google Gadgets triggered a few discussions on whether or not the public APIs (Google Maps, etc) consumed by mashup dashboards and applicaitons will really be embraced by Enterprise IT. The hesitation expressed concerned the lack of ownership and control of the data.

For those of you that didn’t see the post, I basically ran through some of the impact that Web 2.0 has had on enterprise dashboards. In particular, I discussed how the availability of APIs from Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc has allowed a surge of Dashboard Mashups - or dashboards that consume both data and behavior from many difference sources. Think of it as web services and SOA come true in its most user-centric way.

There was no doubt among the Dashboard Spy readership that the user experience will benefit, but some dashboarders with a traditional IT mindset seemed a little “scared” of the fact that their applications would be exposing both data and behavior that they did not own.

I point out the very informative InfoWorld article from July 28, 2006 called Enterprise Mashups: Web 2.0 Style Integration at the Browser Isn’t Just for Consumer Apps Anymore and Businesses Are Starting to Take Notice.

I took the liberty of “borrowing” a couple of key graphics from the article (Once a Dashboard Spy, always a Dashboard Spy, I suppose!).

First, let’s have a look at what they call “The beautiful simplicity of mashups”.

Here is a listing of what they identified as enterprise mashup best practices:

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Using the word “Aesthetics” in conjunction with discussing business dashboards or software in general can be tricky. As most commonly used, aesthetics refers to the way something looks and whether or not it can be considered art. Let’s not go into the discussion of whether various dashboard software elements look good or not. I truly believe that most of that is basically opinion (although of course there are generally accepted prinicipals). No, what I am trying to get to is more of a common category of a visual look. An aesthetic, for example, would be the current Web 2.0 look. You know, that shiny, big-button look that you see everywhere these days. Even on business dashboards.

How does something become an aesthetic? Without delving deeply into the “what is art” discussion, I would say that an aethestic develops out of seeing common design solutions arise out of a particular time and place (virtual places are allowed - doesn’t have to be a physical location). This confluence of similar design takes hold and eventually becomes something that is purposefully strived for as a “look”. That’s when it becomes an aesthetic.

Starting a few years ago, we saw a real growth in the use of CSS for design and styling purposes. By adopting CSS-driven approaches to design elements, we started to see common looks arise. For example, the gradient background, the rounded corners, etc. This css-based look appeared on the “new” sites that were powered by the technologies that we associate with Web 2.0 - CSS/DOM/AJAX, etc. Once the Web 2.0 “look” started being shared through templates (especially on blogging platforms), this look really took off - in fact, it became rapidly emulated. Now, we have the Web 2.0 aesthetic - one that new sites want to adopt so as to be seen as Web 2.0 i.e. new and improved!

Here is a good slide presentation of what makes something look like Web 2.0:

Bringing the discussion back to business intelligence dashboard design and the Web 2.0 design aesthetic, let’s take a look at a dashboard screenshot sent to me by a Dashboard Spy reader who is indeed striving for that 2.0 look.

I have it over at the Dashboards by Example site, but here is a quick screengrab of the upcoming new Dashboard/Scorecard product that’s been under wraps. Have a look and I’ll explain more in the post titled Balanced Scorecard Meets Web 2.0. Please click on the image to bring up a larger dashboard screenshot:

Tags: Dashboard Design, Web 2.0 Aesthetic, Business Intelligence Dashboard Design

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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