"Alert-level control is another feature used to establish relevance within the content domain. Alerts help manage exceptions and alert the user of any unusual change or threshold value reached for any KPI. So, the action resulting from alerts needs to be assigned to those users who need to be informed of the exceptions." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"Alerts and KPI thresholds are two sides of the same coin. Alerts are actions taken once a KPI threshold is reached. However, alerts are not defined for every threshold boundary. For the most part, they serve as a warning system when a KPI shows poor performance or an undesired trend. Alerts must always be accompanied by attention-capturing actions such as automatic e-mails and/or visual indication such as blinking or animation on the dashboard. The other variable for alerts is the recipient. There may be one or more appropriate recipients for each alert." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"Alerts are integral to the dashboard concept in that they transform the dashboard from a graphical information presentation into a live console for managing organizational processes and performance. Effective dashboard deployment must facilitate easy management of alerts. This management process involves three components: (1) rules, (2) actions, and (3) recipients." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"Although it does so much more, the central purpose of a dashboard is to warn the user when any relevant metrics are out of acceptable boundaries. In the dashboard terminology, these alerts consisting of rules and actions add critical value to an enterprise dashboard deployment complemented with strong visual indicators of warnings." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"Charts also demand internal color choices: the colors of the pies, bars, speedometer thresholds, and so on. The default colors supplied by any standard dashboard software are often well selected with a professional designer’s input. However, a dashboard creator may have the liberty to change these colors at his or her discretion. If a dashboard is being deployed for a large audience, it is a good practice to seek advice from a professional designer in selecting the chart colors, so that they may have a positive visual appeal to the largest possible number of users. As every professional designer knows, there is a lot of science in color choice and its relative placements. Even more important, a spectrum of emotional messages is associated with each color." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"[...] in many instances the choice of charts may not be so obvious, requiring a degree of flexibility and creativity. Some of the contemporary, popular chart types include traffic lights, speedometers or dials, thermometers, donuts, and bubble charts. The choice of charts also depends on area constraints on the dashboard. For example, if the available area is narrow but high, a thermometer representation may work well instead of a speedometer, which requires more of a square-shaped area. Similarly, traffic lights may represent KPIs effectively within a relatively small area - just enough to have three small circles representing the three colored lamps in a traffic light. This model is also effective in conveying the relative performance of the charted KPIs: a red light jumps out at the viewer, drawing immediate attention." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"Metrics are measurements of activities to evaluate performance, mostly within a relative framework of time, geography, and aggregation." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"Speedometer chart types could be applied to contrast quota versus actual sales numbers for the sections and categories. Clicking on a given area of the chart could then lead to a more detailed report. Also, regional maps could be transposed with threshold-driven color-coded metrics for better visualization of various states within the region and also to show their comparative performance at a glance." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"Subject area is a surrogate layer of content grouping that helps in managing the content access to users. A subject area could be defined as a collection of dashboards, reports, charts, or KPIs." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"The dashboard framework must also facilitate a retracing of the drill-down path. A user should be easily able to get to the previous chart from the destination chart. This recursive capacity helps create a better self-guided analysis experience. If users are not able to retrieve the previous chart easily during a drill-down path, they may lose track of their thought sequence. An inability to retrace may lead to user frustration and a dysfunctional self-guided analysis." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"The distinguishing feature is that a dashboard is an application with a collection of metrics, benchmarks, goals, results, and alerts presented in a visually effective manner, whereas a portal is a collection of different applications presented together within a personalized framework." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"The term dashboard has acquired a vibrant new meaning in the field of information management as leading organizations worldwide embrace the idea of empowerment through improved real-time information systems. In the current corporate vocabulary, a dashboard is a rich computer interface with charts, reports, visual indicators, and alert mechanisms that are consolidated into a dynamic and relevant information platform." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"To establish a uniform performance benchmark across the organization, it is important that variance of a specific KPI be consistent across all of its possible grains." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"Variance establishes the comparison benchmark for each KPI. It has two requirements: (1) the basis for change and (2) change calculation. The most commonly applied references for the basis are relative periodic comparisons: year ago, quarter ago, and month ago. Other types of change basis are forecast, operational plan, quota, and so on. The most commonly applied values for change calculations are Difference, Percentage Change, and Percent Point Change." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
"Visualization is an issue at the heart of good dashboard software. Good visualization can be the difference between information overload and information insight. Commonly used graphs (charts) are one example of visualization. However, present-day technology has raised the bar of visualization beyond commonplace charts and data widgets. The three key characteristics requiring evaluation within the area of visualization are: (1) Visual intelligence ( 2) Geographic mapping (3) Screen resolution." (Shadan Malik, "Enterprise Dashboards: Design and best practices for IT", 2005)
No comments:
Post a Comment