{"id":1395,"date":"2010-07-26T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-26T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1395"},"modified":"2010-06-14T18:40:35","modified_gmt":"2010-06-15T02:40:35","slug":"pretty-is-not-useful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1395","title":{"rendered":"Pretty is not Useful"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Not all of us have fancy business intelligence tools and cool dashboards with great graphs prepared for us in our business environments yet.\u00a0 If we\u2019re lucky, we belong to organizations that have spent millions of dollars figuring out how to get us analytics when we log into self service environments.\u00a0 Or perhaps we have bought into a cool talent application tool that already had the functionality.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been prophesying that business intelligence would go directly to the manager\/end user rather than having requests for ad hoc reports that would have to be processed for days before the end user ever got any data.\u00a0 Even if we don\u2019t have all the cool dashboards and business intelligence tools at our disposal, I\u2019m hoping that many of us have used the cool image and graphing functionality in MS Office 2007.\u00a0 Indeed, the software now presents all sorts of data in all sorts of new, flashy and easy to build ways.\u00a0 From a consulting perspective, beautiful and sexy is a wonderful thing.<\/p>\n

The problem is that\u2026. well, there\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n

Have you noticed that many of the charts you are getting are 3 dimensional?\u00a0 From my perspective, they are beautiful, and the formatting is impeccable, but I can\u2019t really tell where the top of the bar lines up with the axis points anymore.\u00a0 Sure I can tell that the top of any bar in a bar chart is\u2026. oh between $20-25M?\u00a0 Yeah \u2013 that\u2019s problematic.\u00a0 I have a $5M effort rate.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure what to do with the dashboards.\u00a0 Managers want quick access and a visual regarding where they are and how their organization is performing.\u00a0 But at the end of the day, don\u2019t the want a data dump into Excel anyway?\u00a0 (warning: data privacy problem, but that\u2019s a different topic).<\/p>\n

Hopefully when we build the BI environment, we were smart.\u00a0 After building our flashy but not very useful graph, we spent another $100K and build the drill-through charts.\u00a0 You know, the ones where you click on the indecipherable bar to get a chart that presents the real data?\u00a0 What we really did was create something that was pretty to look at, and then force the manager to click to get at what she really wants.\u00a0 And we paid for it.\u00a0 Sounds like good, smart design based on great user experience principles to me.<\/p>\n

Ok, I know that there will be a revolt if I actually suggest that everyone goes back to 2D charts.\u00a0 We all love our flashy reports and dashboards.\u00a0 But can we just make sure they are actually helpful before we publish the stuff?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not all of us have fancy business intelligence tools and cool dashboards with great graphs prepared for us in our business environments yet.\u00a0 If we\u2019re lucky, we belong to organizations that have spent millions of dollars figuring out how to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27,2,34],"tags":[158,87,126,154],"class_list":["post-1395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-metrics","category-hr-technology","category-implementation","tag-business-intelligence","tag-dashboards","tag-design","tag-user-experience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1395"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1399,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1395\/revisions\/1399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}