Visual Display of Process Information
The dashboard is the CEO’s killer app, making the gritty details of a business that are often buried deep within a large organization accessible at a glance to senior executives. So powerful are the programs that they’re beginning to change the nature of management
— Giving The Boss The Big Picture; February 13, 2006 BusinessWeek Online
William McDonough is one of the members of Paul Hawken’s next industrial revolution concept. This exercise is my loose interpretation inspired by McDonough’s quote about design in general… “Our culture has adopted a design stratagem that essentially says that if brute force or massive amounts of energy don't work, you're not using enough of it.”
Take a spreadsheet program. At its most primitive, it is a tool for manipulating data. Beyond that, it is a tool for communicating. The problem is, most traditional chart types don’t deal with the data explosion. And some of the newer ways I’ve seen to display information are a little busy. Most visualizations seem designed for one highly specialized academic to communicate with another of similar background.
Suppose you wanted to communicate the basics of a process. We could look at a typical control chart done in textbook fashion…
Do Not think about a white polar bear,
or the second data point from the left.
Same data and scale.
Immediately the eye is drawn to the data point which is most atypical of the system. Where is the eye not drawn? To the average and the variation. Now where are the usual obstacles to extracting information from a data set? Not seeing the big picture, and focusing on the odd occurrence that may only be a symptom of system structure. Also we have the charting problem of the imaginary trend. Should adjacent data points indicate a trendline by chance, the human mind automatically sees the pattern and projects future (phantom) data indefinitely. It is hard to overestimate the trouble this causes.
Some people just don’t like looking at reams of data and visualizing ratios. An entrepreneurial personality type may not come to the same data set with the unflagging love of pouring over figures the number cruncher does. There are many big picture, bottom line people in business.
And there are simply times when you want to have what’s important jump off the page at you. New employees, encountering unfamiliar data sets, and making task data available as feedback to a wider audience not trained to interpret it are examples.
Some consider this the time to apply massive amounts of training and think user manuals to adapt users to the technology. Information design looks for alternatives to making the user work hard to make the technology look good. One alternative would be to focus on how to use the technology to make the user feel smart.
Visuals Designed To Reduce The Workload Of Interpretation
Humans have visual rules for alerting them to things worth focusing on. And all the training in the world is not going to alter this hardwiring. It could be argued the more information to be extracted from a rapidly changing data rich environment, the more you should rely on these simple visual rules.
A UI design based around flight controls has proven visual rules. Deflection from vertical indicates data important for the user. Visually, you can scan a bank of similar indicators and instantly zero in on those few which have something significant to focus on. vertical.
The reason such widgets have proven useful in executive dashboards is they enable you to see the big picture. Minimum cognitive load for maximum leverage of intellectual assets. In other words, the reason you pay for technology in the first place is to work smart, not hard . Too often interfaces follow McDonough’s observation of a brute force design imperative.
Processes have inputs and
outputs, lower and upper limits.
The Other Peter Principle: Working Hard, Not Smart
Hamburger Management: the process of doing everything as quickly and cheaply as possible. When everything has to be done yesterday, there can be no time for debate or questioning. Blind obedience is required because that is the only response that fits the constant demands for going faster and doing more with fewer and fewer resources.
— Why We Should Put an End to “Hamburger Management”
I was having a phone conversation with a writer I’ve known for some time. It didn’t take long for the conversation to get around to the subject of increasing business. This writer, his name is Peter, wanted to increase business from what he described as “the 40% level,” to something closer to 100%. In the past, the closer he got to the ever–elusive 100% mark, the harder (exponentially harder) he had to work.
Our culture has adopted a design stratagem that essentially says that if brute force or massive amounts of energy don’t work, you’re not using enough of it.
—William McDonoughDoes anyone really comprehend the full impact of this with customer service call count data snaking off the upper end of the chart? The more calls handled the better, right?
Increased call counts could, over time, increase product returns and lower customer lifetime value or share of wallet. On this chart the Call Count would change first, then others like Product Returns. Only later would indicators on another level change. These dial type charts are simple enough to link into clusters.
Linking encourages visualization of cause and effect relationships, and thus aids early detection and troubleshooting of source problems, before symptoms further up the cluster occur.
Helping Your Customers Work Smarter Using Web Interfaces
Wireframe of UI offered to clients of
a construction company
Worst of all, if working harder passes for working smart internally, it’s quite possible that philosophy has crossed over into the user interfaces your company offers customers.
A construction company wanted to go further than branding a design. Instead, they wanted to brand through design and offer premium positioning which allowed them to sell at prices higher than competitors.
The persuasive design of the interface developed was essentially a management tool directed at the construction project manager of projects in the $500k–$1 million range.
This dashboard design provides overview of key performance indicators, like overtime. The design goal was to influence a user to use the contractor’s management friendly interface where competitors typically thump down a phonebook sized invoice, then wonder why there is a receivables lag.
New Premium Positioning: “We are the only company which provides shots of the inventory as it is delivered.” If you have a question about an order, you can log into your account, and see the work and every piece of inventory via on–site cameras.
Wedding videographers provide live webcam coverage for sub–$5,000 jobs, and companies which takes daily shapshots of backorders viewable through their website — and their average order is under $100. Yet when companies with seven figure billable per project — seeking premium positioning — aren’t doing this, it’s not a technology problem. (There are numerous prefab widgets in many programming languages which can be pressed into service). It is, however, an ideal situation for information design to take on.
Many a plan has been sabotaged because systems have been pushed beyond their level of information competence. Often the people blamed for the problem aren’t given the information systems or authority to adapt. So, invisible to modern technology, Ready, Aim, Fire crosses over Ready, Fire, Aim to become Fire, Fire, Fire.
Resources
- The idea speed kills is apt, but without the right information, speed becomes professional suicide or hamburger management.
- “Some businesses are turning old call–centre certainties on their head, trying to spend more time with their customers rather than less – or more time with their ‘highvalue’ customers. Most are giving their operators real authority to make decisions on the fly, and the information, training and applications to let them do it.” (Wake Up Call; The Age, By Rob O’Neill, October 26, 2004)
- Gerry McGovern writes, “Being busy is often an excuse for not doing something you should be doing. For me it has often been an excuse for not thinking, managing, and planning properly. Working hard is no longer the route to success it once was perceived to be.”
- XML/SWF Gauge allows you to develop web gauges and dials from dynamic data, requires the user have Flash Player 6 or later installed.
- Ambient Devices offers a range of household information objects using simple visuals to communicate information. These new product designs are based on the ideas of calm technology.
- Time pressure quashes creativity because it limits people’s freedom to ponder different options and directions; Bridget Murray interviews Teresa Amabile, PhD, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Focuses on the good and bad time pressures in problem solving.
- Keep in mind the digital dashboard has a singular information objective: decision superiority. Key Performance Indicators sound good, provided some fairly sound thinking about what is truly key.
- “Our work with end–users suggests that users must quickly understand the visualization. So, if we create very informative visualizations that take some time to get used to (or worse, take a long time to understand even after we are used to the landscape), then, often these visualizations fail to be useful from a user’s perspective.” (Visualization of Information and Data: Where We Are and Where Do We Go From Here?; Jeffery S. Saltz, Jonathan M. Steinbach; J.P. Morgan) Many times the viewer of the graph is its hardest working part, somehow defeating the purpose of the visual display of information.
- Although the pilot of the cutting edge F22 is rapidly moving through a data rich 3D environment, the display is 2D and digests complexity into simple geometric shapes. The Edwards AFB site describes the carefree abandon concept that flying a multi million dollar jet, funneling tons of data about a battlefield from multiple sources, should be as easy to operate as your car. The page is interesting in describing carefree abandon as enabling the pilot to be a tactician and information manager. Certainly a philosophy worthy of wider application, a kind of Digital Cockpit for Tracking a Corporation’s Performance Giving The Boss The Big Picture; February 13, 2006 BusinessWeek Online.
- William McDonough is an architect (of buildings not software) with some interesting design ideas. Of specific interest to me are his expansive ideas about what constitutes a system, its inputs and outputs. His site is www.mcdonough.com
- Implementation Note: This design originated as a paper–and–ink tool for quickly communicating financial measures to entrepreneurs. My own design exercise was to adapt it as a front end to a spread sheet module. Visual Components, Inc. of Lenexa, KS used to make a control called Formula One which can pull this off for a nominal licensing fee. Also, lock the proportions of the indicator dials, or a click–and–drag resize operation (as you would need for creating cluster groups as outlined above) will create abstract art, not a larger indicator.