Design

Less than 30 percent of the potential users of organizations’ standard business intelligence (BI) tools use the technology today. This low take-up is due to the fact that longstanding tools and approaches to BI are often too difficult to use, slow to respond or deliver content of limited relevance.

—Gartner⁵

The three reasons cited by Gartner for this problem are:

1. Ease of use (“is hard to work with”)
2. Performance (“users are frustrated by delays”)
3. Relevance (“does not express content in line with their frame of reference”)

The first and last reasons link directly to issues of poor data product design.

In our role as dashboard and analytical application designers, this is an area that is close to home. We see it all the time: reports and dashboards that lack focus and a message that targets their audience, which is often undefined. We see poor choices in data visualization that distract from the important elements in the...