Practical help with KPIs, measures and reporting
Using brain science to design better reports and dashboards The challenge with dashboards is that we are trying to convey an insanely large amount of information in a very small space. A dashboard I built for a client a couple of years ago had nearly 2,000 pieces of information on an A3 sheet. To be [...]
I just poured myself a cup of water from the water chiller. I noticed that it helpfully offers two temperatures of water and has a little light with “Compressor on” next to it. Why would you put this on a customer facing display? What they really mean is “this water cooler is working and cooling [...]
I was in the Cabinet War Rooms a little while ago (the bunker where Churchill ran his WWII operations – for anyone not familiar). Something that struck me was the universal use of really clear, concise and well thought out charts, graphs and maps. Here’s a shot of one: The key on this graph [...]
What’s the quickest way of making your report look rubbish and/or be unreadable? It’s simple, design it for one delivery format (A4 printed page, plasma, PowerPoint, Blackberry etc.) and then put in on another delivery medium. You know the symptoms, an Excel table pasted into a PowerPoint slide, a PDF that you can’t read on [...]
Most people don’t look at the bottom of their laptop. If they do then they will see one of two things: If it’s a Apple Mac the bottom with be smooth and (with the latest ones) completely featureless apart from four rounded rubber feet. If it’s a PC it will have little hatches, a Microsoft [...]
I’ve just had a bill through from Virgin. It’s not often I find myself smiling when I look at a bill, but this one was a bit different. Virgin have redesigned the bill and put a nice explanation in there as well, see this image (click on it for a bigger version).. I like this [...]
Most people just use the default graphs on Excel, perhaps with a colour change or two. Who says that Microsoft knows how much detail to put on your graphs? The default graphs (or charts, if you speak Microsoft English) are jam-packed with clutter. Why should you care? Every piece of clutter in a graph makes [...]
I can still remember how excited I was when, aged 7, I got my first digital watch. It was clear to me that digital watches, with their accuracy and lack of complicated hands, were going to conquer the world. So why am I here 33 years later with an analogue watch? Surprisingly it’s to do [...]
Sometimes things jar when you first see them. I see this a lot with dashboards that I help design (or redesign). People become very wedded to both the look – but more crucially they are wedded to the logic of how something is laid out. I think a brilliant example of this is the modern [...]
What are the dangers of using defaults on Excel and why do we put up with it?
