Practical help with KPIs, measures and reporting
There’s a very interesting article in the Guardian on mobile software design for the real world. One of the points they make is, through watching phone users, the authors of Polar have established that 49% of users drive their phone apps with just one thumb. This is interesting to the app designers for all kinds [...]
I’m often asked how to create KPIs and measures. It’s not a short process, which is why most people end up brainstorming or using existing measures when they are tasked with doing this (check out this article – Six KPI Selection Traps to Avoid to see some of the other pitfalls). The good news is [...]
The Brilliant Dashboards Checklist: A systematic approach to assessing your dashboard You may be trying to work out why your current reports aren’t working properly or wondering if you missed anything on your newly created masterpiece. This design checklist encourages you to consider each element of your design and to score it if you are [...]
Excel rules the roost when it comes to real-world management information. It’s easy to knock it, but millions of people find it quick and painless to use. There are some things you just should not do in Excel. Here’s my highly subjective list. Never…. Use Excel as a database. OK, I know you are [...]
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 [...]
Here’s a quick summary of 10 key points you need to take into account when you build a dashboard. 1) Know your target audience You cannot make everyone happy with one dashboard. If you have more than one target group it may make sense to create a separate dashboard for each group. Be sensible [...]
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?
