Data Visualization Golden Rules

Last week I posted about a friend of mine, John Brookmyre, who blogged about getting started with cloud computing. It's a great post and John's blog is something that's definately worth keeping an eye on, because he understands and can communicate business intelligence very well in addition to being able to deliver technically in some 20+ platforms.



John's latest post, is about business intelligence data visualization, something that I've been very interested in for the 2 years, and have written about my experiences in the following;

• User Centred Design and Business Intelligence
• Business Intelligence Dashboards

Interestingly, Johns post has been commented on by Tableau Software, who are niche players in the BI market, but among the industry leaders in BI data visualisation. You can trial the software, which I did about 9 months ago when I was looking for alternatives to Microsoft Performance Point Server.



On that occasion the client purchased PPS instead, which we deployed via a customised sharepoint front end. We got round the limitations of both PPS and sharepoint with some clever visualisation tricks and the result was stunning. I'd been reading Stephen Few's blog for a while, (he's a modern day Edward Tufte) and also had some recent experience of heuristic evaluation, which meant I was well up to speed on usability and visualization. If your interested in getting into the subject then these are good places to start.



Back to Tableau though. It's a very interesting product and I wasn't able to get through it all in the 28 days. I managed some very pleasing visualisations involving multiple graphs in a grid formation. The advantages of this being you waste very little space on title's and legends as you benefit from a write once, use many policy. I managed to get 25 graphs on screen (5x5) in a layout that wasn't off-putting, and I could see it working for business users. I've pasted in below an example of the tableau website, that demonstrates the type of visualisation I'm describing. (I like to think that mine was better though!)

User Centred Design and Business Intelligence

Traditional Business Intelligence was all about numbers, charts and reports and it's been replaced by super whizzy dashboards that promise the earth but may or may not deliver value.

Business Intelligence applications, along with email, are probably the only system that senior executives of companies actually use. As such they have visibility that's unrivalled from other IT areas and therefore why not make them a showcase of IT. A User Centred Design ( UCD ) approach can deliver a look and feel that exceeds peoples expectations, whilst avoiding the temptation to play with technology and overload on 'gimmicky' sliders and gauges.

Taking the time to sit down to map and understand the user journey can change the whole design of an application and deliver something that's really usable and adds value.

But isn't that just capturing the business requirements?

No, it goes beyond that. Understanding what the next move needs to be at each point creates new opportunities to link in deeper analysis, link to operational systems to action items as they are identified, memo issues so that they can be referred to later or trigger workflow tasks on the fly. Then have all of that designed by someone with years of experience in graphic design so that it looks fantastic. If you thought about it , why would you let a programmer design a front end that goes in front of the CEO?

Fantastic, I'll take two. Well, it's not that easy. Working with BI tools isn't the blank canvas that you have with traditional uses of User Centred Design such as web design. The tools have bounds and limits that you can't go beyond, and varying degrees of customisation. At the top end you could re-skin app's published in Sharepoint and have breathtaking state of the art look and feel. At the other end of the spectrum, you can make seemingly simple layout and design changes that transform mediocre reports into clean, professional, visually appealing documents that speak quality.

We use highly skilled IT professionals to build Business Intelligence applications, shouldn't we use highly skilled Creative professionals to design them?

Business Intelligence Dashboards : Are they all they're cracked up to be? Yes and No...!

Traditionally Business Intelligence is about numbers, charts and reports right? Big mainframe reporting systems using Focus or SAS, or even COBOL (those were the days, PIC S9(9) COMP-3, happy memories!!). Or early implementations of Microstrategy or Business Objects that looked good in their day, but seem out of place now.

The trend with technology companies for a few years now has been to make this front end graphical and 'fancy', and to sell the concept of a dashboard. Tools like Business Objects Excelsius and Microsoft Performance Point Server two examples of the leaders. One can't but help get the feeling though that technology has got ahead of the business requirements. Sure, we've all come to expect fancy graphics, but if these don't add any business value then what you end up with is 'gimmicky', 'fun' tools, that don't really add anything above charts and reams of numbers, or worse, deliver less. Charts after all did do the job for decades.

People like the dashboard concept because it promises summarised, easily understandable, relevant, actionable information. It's too easy though to under deliver on this promise. The idea that we can define rules that highlight exceptions, so that time spent analysing numbers is minimised and people are presented with the answer, is an attractive one but not one based on reality. 'Retail is Detail' so the saying goes and reading a retailers trading reports is not a simple business, if it was, buyers would have been replaced with Quants developing algorithms to manage the entire buy/supply process, and I'm not aware of any retailer doing this, or even remotely near it.

But let's not lose heart. That doesn't mean we can't get dashboards working. We need to concentrate on the business requirements and the business value and avoid the temptation to 'play' with technology. We can and should make the applications look good, processes like User Centred Design can add very significant value. Business Intelligence applications, along with email, are probably the only system that senior executives of companies actually use. As such they have visibility that's unrivalled from other IT areas and therefore why not make them a showcase of IT. Charts have their place and we need to play on their strengths and build in functionality that enhances them rather than supercedes them.

Too often the temptation with dashboards is to hide charts behind petrol gauges and sliders, why not have the chart of numbers as the centre piece and use it as the entry point into graphs, charts and deeper analysis.