I’ve had a couple of days away from the office and spent some time doing arty stuff with the kids. While we had the table covered in glitter and glue I got them to help me with an extension of the point I was making in my last post on dashboard layouts. I made the claim then that a lot of dashboards we see look like those fuzzy felt pictures we used to play with at school and quite literally throw together. The issue is not the content, it is the way the content is presented and how little thought seemingly goes into that presentation. Here’s what we came up with in a few minutes:
The scary thing is it isn’t a million miles away from what you get if you do a Google image search for ‘Executive Dashboard’. I’m starting to suspect that not a lot of thought has gone into the design of those devices either.
So let’s think a little more about the purpose of the executive dashboard in a modern university:
- inform the university executive about institutional performance
- communicate instantly, clearly and unambiguously
- automatically highlight matters that require attention (not just extremes)
Such a device might do this through:
- comparing actual performance against targets and/or prior periods
- careful selection and limited use of colours and saturations
- intuitive and informative arrangement of elements
- deliberate removal of unnecessary ‘clutter’ such as axis values when providing macro context
- use of simple elements - tables, bar, column, line, sparkline and bullet charts
- dynamic highlighting of data determined to be of high importance
- aesthetically clean and appealing presentation of information
If you review your favourite local BI report, the one you’re really proud of, does it achieve any of the above? I did and it didn’t, but the change needed is underway. When you do make change in light of improved understanding, the improvement really is quite obvious and something that can be learned.
I’ve actually been reading and learning (a lot) about visualisation for a little while now and I know there is a wealth of information out there to help us avoid building fuzzy felt disasters, but they just keep on coming.
I personally cringe when I see a lot of presentations, television commercials (oh don’t even go there) and magazine ads. Does that make me a visualisation snob? I guess it could but it also makes me want to evangelise even more. I firmly believe part of our role as BI/DW professionals is to do a great job of communicating information. The better and more developed our appreciation of good design, the better our communication, and as everyone keeps telling me these days, you can’t communicate too much.
If you’re curious about your ability to judge between good and bad graph design then have a go at Stephen Few’s Graph Design IQ Test and if you think you need some help then his book Information Dashboard Design should probably be on your desk (a lot of this also applies to BI report design too by the way).
There’s nothing wrong with being a ‘visualisation snob’, perhaps tempered to ‘visualisation savvy’. My favourite graffiti grab is : ‘eschew obfuscation’ and that is what our role in this business should always be. Unfortunately we are up against spinning dials and flashing lights that can all too easily bedazzle, and don’t the BI software salespeople know it. So we do have to keep fighting the good fight and constantly reiterating that less is more.