Information visualisation

One of the big challenges of providing usability, accessibility and analytics consultancy services to help businesses improve their customer experience, is to ensure that information is digestible and therefore more readily usable and practical.

There is a trend, particularly in the web analytical arena, for some consultancies to simply create more and more metrics for businesses, rather than working on their clarity. Unfortunately, there is also a tendency for many people to suffer from ‘data blindness’ when confronted with rafts of metrics churned out by multiple tools and technologies. Advertising campaign management, web analytics, CRM, and other intelligence tools should enable businesses to interact better with their customers, but for many actually understanding all that information – particularly across wide portfolio websites – proves very frustrating.

This is why we and our customers place such value in effective visual dashboarding – known to some as data visualisation. But does everyone really understand what a dashboard is supposed to do? If we ask new clients whether they already use dashboards, many will say they do. But when we actually see these tools for ourselves, they often turn out to be Excel workbooks or similar spreadsheet style presentations riddled with tabs for all manner of different metrics. Sure, internal web analysts may spend many well intentioned days compiling these books to send around the business, but they rarely receive widespread adoption simply because most people don’t understand metrics in this dense form. This style of ‘dashboard’, if it can even be called such, is not targeted and really just represents dumped reporting. It’s an inadequate ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that confuses most people and lacks any practical meaning.

At Foviance we know how important it is to understand business requirements before attempting to produce proper dashboards that help individuals understand key performance indicators (KPIs). In most cases, a dashboard wouldn’t attempt to present more than around ten KPIs, but would be sufficiently flexible to present different information for different people across a business with different information needs. We also try to help people understand the difference between metrics and KPIs – a metric is a simple measure that can be quantitavely assessed, but a KPI is an indicator that actually means something to individual people across a business when it goes up or down, and importantly it is something that can then be acted upon.

So an effective KPI framework or strategy helps people understand and challenge KPIs. These frameworks can be distilled down to a short list of things those people really need to measure that means something to them and which they are able to display and share in an immediately understandable way. How does last month’s figure relate to a previous year? How about month on month? Is that fluctuation typical or unusual? Is that good or bad?

We hone our dashboarding techniques through the use of ‘sparklines’ – inline charts that clearly show how the trends and variations of particular metrics. The technique and term was created by Edward Tufte, a noted American statistician and expert in information design. We have listened to Stephen Few, another respected expert in the field of effective visual communication who examined dashboard design and visualisation to see why some methods fail and others succeed.

We try to think of business dashboards like airplane cockpits – there is a huge amount of granular data we could present, but the most important thing is to clearly and immediately highlight critical indicators and common KPIs. A business that discovers it had 100,000 page impressions over the past week actually knows nothing unless it has also been alerted to the fact it had 10,000 or 1,000,000 the previous week. Good dashboards alert anomalies and dramatic trend tacks. The right people can then dive into annual averages assess significance and highlight possible actions. Initially though, the dashboard should clearly display from afar or at glance any issue of possible immediate concern – just like in a cockpit.

We’re continuing to develop ‘dashboarding’ as service at Foviance, and we’re making particular strides in this field right now. Talk to us about tactical dashboards, strategic dashboards, and how they can help different audiences across your own business with short and long term planning, as well as the unexpected.

This article was written as part of the crossing the channels of experience March newsletter