Here are several excerpts from an article by Allan Willie, President of Serence, a dashboard software vendor, Dashboards and the Human Condition:
Dashboards unlock the added value in decades of IT investment in the form of competitive advantage through better decisions. But the humans make the decisions. None of these ERP deployments, business intelligence rollouts, analysis upgrades, or reporting launches are worth a dime without a human who monitors and acts on the information they provide. The only things all these systems and investments have in common are display screens and humans. Dashboards are the final link that connects your systems to your people. They really are interfaces between your systems and your business decisions. Therefore a dashboard that accommodates the behavior of the human user in addition to exposing business data is bound to add more value.
Your dashboard software is your last opportunity to match the strengths of your systems with the strengths of your people — or to compensate for their limitations. Despite our individuality, there are some behaviors that most of the human race shares in common. This is also true when you look at how humans interact with a computer. That’s why there’s a whole discipline devoted to human computer interaction. To get the most out of your IT investments, we need to design dashboards that complement these behaviors…
The Rule of PlacementThe first characteristic most of us share on a computer is laziness. One economist has suggested that the only two traits common to all of us are laziness and greed. But that’s a bit dark for a dashboard article. Let’s call it busyness instead — as in, we’re busy doing other things. It’s safe to assume that the higher up you climb on the corporate ladder, the busier you become.
This brings us to the first requirement of an ideal dashboard. It must appear where it cannot be missed or ignored. If you need to look for it, you won’t. This is the rule of placement.
To get the most out of your systems and your people, your dashboard has to appear on their desktop. Stand alone applications and Web-based reporting are good but once you have too many to manage they’re no good at all. The desktop is better. With the information that matters appearing on your desktop, you can maintain peripheral awareness of the important metrics without interrupting your workflow.
The Rule of Design
we need to design desktop dashboards with profound simplicity. This is the organization’s last opportunity to transform investments into added value. It’s the last opportunity to transform information into knowledge. Not much can fit on a desktop dashboard if you want everything to be legible at a glance. Even properly designed charts will fail to communicate if you stuff 20 of them into a small space and hope that a busy human will struggle to see and interpret them.
Along with designing these elements properly we have to be judicious in choosing which metrics appear on the desktop dashboard. Taking this thought one step further, we have to understand which changes or thresholds are sufficiently important that dashboard alerts should be triggered. This could take the form of higher priority items bumping lower priority ones off of your desktop. Truly urgent alerts may have to appear as pop-ups or be sent to your mobile device. Achieve all this and you’re ready for dashboards to recommend resolutions to the human decision-maker as well.
The Rule of Accuracy
The rules of placement and design point to a third rule that looks like a technology issue rather than one based on the human condition. The rule of accuracy suggests that for humans to look at and act on the information shown on their dashboards, it must be correct.
Humans quickly learn to pay attention to things that matter and to ignore things that don’t. Even if your dashboard appears right where it should be for persistent awareness, and even if the information it displays is properly designed, we will pay attention to it only as long as the information is correct. The first time you make a decision based on a dashboard and it’s later proven to be incorrect, you begin to lose faith in your dashboard. If this situation occurs regularly you will eventually ignore your dashboard or turn it off altogether. That’s the human side of the rule of accuracy but it has serious implications for enterprise information systems. It means your desktop dashboard must consistently present complete and accurate information.
There are two ways of doing this. Your dashboard can either reconcile all your different information systems itself, or draw on a business intelligence system that already does this for you. One way or another, your desktop dashboard has to be data agnostic or it will fail. Interestingly, this rule may be the easiest to follow because business intelligence vendors have been working on meshing heterogeneous data sources for years.
