Having recently worked with customers on their information dissemination challenges we put together this video to show the Stroop Effect. This is particularly powerful during Business Intelligence reports and where users have pattern associations.
Making reporting intuitive and insightful can be a challenge - you need to maximise the useful information available whilst providing the business actionable insights - in the right context, to the right level of detail and in a timely manner. This a big challenge however there are some simple techniques that can assist your users to understand the information.
One that we have recently demonstrated to a client is trying to allow users to pattern match or use the associations that they are used to seeing. This could be that red is bad and green is good as a very obvious example, but this can be extended to different types of details such as symbol use. The aim of this is reducing the time for a user to interpret the results, this is known as the Stroop Effect (more details on Wikipedia).
By portraying the information that maximises the users inherent knowledge or meets their preconceived patterns the data can be interpreted much quicker. We typically try and do this through a myriad of ways such as:
Using known hierarchies: Ensuring that the information they are expecting to see together is presented together and uses the common names or styles of that dimension. This would typically include a business unit or function or product which is displayed alongside the similar items. ColoursAs mentioned above this can cover basic indications of positive and negative but could also include the common colour associations with a product or brand - coal would be black and soil would be brown etc. This sounds simple but if you are looking at a multi-tier report or dashboard this consistency and knowledge can save considerable time and frustration. Symbols and Controls I expect a + or an up arrow to be positive as per the comment on colour. This needs to be handled with care, I currently fly a lot and the airport I use has the departure sign as a plane taking off but the arrival plane is one facing the opposite way - a good representation but not the ideal image as you arrive to the airport and see a plane directed towards the ground.With the explosion of Web 2.0 there are lots of common user interface techniques or widgets which users come across regularly and these should be maximised and harnessed for users to traverse their data.
The above are a couple of very simple examples for giving your users the information that they need and using some really simple techniques to speed up their interpretation. We would like to know what you do and your thoughts on this in the comments field below.
Thanks,
For more details on our data visualisation and Business Intelligence initiatives you can reach us here: Technical@5point9.com
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