Book Image

FusionCharts Beginner's Guide: The Official Guide for FusionCharts Suite

Book Image

FusionCharts Beginner's Guide: The Official Guide for FusionCharts Suite

Overview of this book

User experience can make or break any app these days, no matter whether it's a commercial product or an internal solution. While most web applications out there are boring and outdated when it comes to their charting, you can make yours both stunning and powerful using FusionCharts Suite. Once you have mastered it, you can give your users a delightful reporting experience in no time at all. FusionCharts Beginner's Guide is a practical, step-by-step guide to using FusionCharts Suite for creating delightful web reports and dashboards. Getting you started quickly, you will learn advanced reporting capabilities like drill-down and JavaScript integration, and charting best practices to make the most out of it. Filled with examples, real-life tips and challenges, this book is the firstofitstype in the visualization industry. The book teaches you to create delightful reports and dashboards for your web applications assuming no previous knowledge of FusionCharts Suite. It gets your first chart up in 15 minutes after which you can play around with different chart types and customize them. You will also learn how to create a powerful reporting experience using drill-down and advanced JavaScript capabilities. You will also connect your charts to server-side scripts pulling data from databases. Finally you round up the experience learning reporting best practices including right chart type selection and practical usability tips. By the end of the book, you will have a solid foundation in FusionCharts Suite and data visualization itself. You will be able to give your users a delightful reporting experience, from developers to management alike.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
FusionCharts
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 9. Increasing the Usability of your Charts

People are getting busier and busier every day. In a bid to do more in less time, they want to see and do things in the quickest and easiest possible way. They want to get started without having to read any help docs and manuals. They want to avoid errors and mistakes to be more efficient with their time. As such, usability has become a necessary condition for survival for business applications, both external and internal. If it’s an external application, more usable applications mean more customers, and if it’s internal, then it is a matter of employee productivity and overall buy-in to the system.

Charts can be made more usable using simple tips and techniques. This leads to quicker comprehension of the data on the chart, and also makes sure that people see and absorb everything that you are trying to convey with the chart.

In this chapter, we shall learn how to:

  • Convey what the chart is for, clearly and succinctly

  • Make charts more meaningful...