In 2010, Stephen will teach a total of seven of his Visual Business Intelligence Workshops on four continents. Here is Stephen’s public workshop schedule for 2010:

Sydney, Australia: February 9-11  (sold out) and February 15-17
São Paulo, Brazil: March 30-April 1 (registration will open soon)
Austin, Texas: April 20-22
Rome, Italy: April 28-30
Boston, Massachusetts: June 8-10
London, United Kingdom: June 22-24
San Francisco, California: September 28-30

In addition to these seven public workshops, there is also the possibility that Stephen will teach one in New Zealand near the end of this year, although nothing is confirmed yet.

If you’re interested in Stephen’s courses, we hope that you’ll join us for one of these workshops.

-Bryan

Even a brilliantly designed dashboard can be met with disapproval by those who will use it if we’re not careful to introduce it in a way that encourages them to focus on what matters. Designs that are effective for monitoring information are quite different from the designs that are usually featured by software vendors and thus emulated by those who use their products. As a result, what people expect of a dashboard’s design is often quite different from what they actually need.

I’ve been asked on several occasions to provide guidelines for dashboard designers to use when introducing a new dashboard. These requests have encouraged me to create a list of questions that the users of the proposed dashboard can be asked to help them assess the merits of its design. I’m sure that this list of questions that I’ve put together in the last few days can be improved with your help, so I’d appreciate it if you would review the following and suggest anything that comes to mind that might improve it. Please keep in mind that I define “dashboard” in a particular way. Here’s my definition:

A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.

(Information Dashboard Design, Stephen Few, O’Reilly Media, 2006)

The key to this definition is the fact that a dashboard is used for monitoring purposes. Its effectiveness should be judged on the basis of its ability to help people monitor what’s going on-that is, to maintain situation awareness.

When asking people to assess the merits of a new dashboard, it usually works best to focus their attention first on the big picture-the dashboard as a whole-and to then drill into the details of each section.

The Dashboard as a Whole

• When you first look at the dashboard, where are your eyes drawn? Are your eyes drawn most to the items that deserve the most attention?
• Can you easily discern how information is organized on the dashboard (for instance, the different sections)?
• Can you easily spot the items that require the most attention?
• Does the dashboard draw your attention to the information rather than to other things that don’t actually convey information?
• Is the information that you consider most important featured prominently on the dashboard?
• Can you quickly scan the dashboard to get an understanding of what’s going on?
• Can you tell the date/time through which the data is effective (for example, as of the end of yesterday or as of five minutes ago)?
• Can you easily compare items and see relationships between items in all cases when that is useful?
• If it works best to get the information in a particular sequence, does the design encourage you to view it in this way and make it easy to do so?
• Does the dashboard provide everything you need to maintain overall situation awareness (the big picture of what’s going on)?
• Can you see everything that you need to construct an overview of what’s going on without having to scroll or change screens?
• Is there anything on the dashboard that you don’t understand? Do you find anything confusing?

Specific Parts of the Dashboard

• Does the way that each measure is displayed express the information in a way that directly supports your needs without having to do conversions or calculations in your head? This could involve something as simple as graphing the variance between expenses and budget directly, rather than making you compare two lines on a single graph.
• Can you rapidly (1) discern the value of each measure, (2) determine whether it is good, bad, or otherwise, and (3) compare it to something that allows you to judge the level of performance?
• Do you have enough information about each item to determine if you must respond in some way?
• If you need to respond to something, can you easily get to any additional information that is needed to determine how to respond?
• Can you perceive each measure as precisely as you need to without being forced to wade through more precision than you need?
• For each measure, can you tell if performance is improving, getting worse, or holding steady? For those measures that lack trend information, would the dashboard be more useful if it were shown?

Take care,

Despite the importance of analytical methods, at times data sensemaking leads to better decisions when we go with our guts. During the last few years enough books to fill a small library have been written about the importance of reflective, analytical thinking, alerting us to errors of less evolved thinking that we so easily slip into. I welcomed these books, read several, and even reviewed a few, but their popularity threatens to tip the balance too far in favor of analytical thinking. A yin and yang balance should exist between the reflective, rational techniques of analysis and the intuitive approach of experts, based on tacit knowledge that has been constructed through time and experience. Tacit knowledge is what enables experts to recognize patterns that others miss entirely. Mental models that experts construct to understand how things work are a form of tacit knowledge. Experts can often size up a situation and know how to respond long before they can articulate their reasons. Although we can get into trouble by trusting our guts, on occasions they serve us better than careful reflection. This is especially true when we deal with problems that dwell in the shadows-those that are murky and complex.

This is the topic of a new book by Gary Klein, who is one of the finest and most insightful observers of human decision-making behavior in the world today. I first became familiar with Klein’s work when I read and reviewed his book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions back in 2007. His new book is Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making.

Klein uses the difference between daylight vision and night vision as a metaphor to distinguish reflective analysis versus intuition born of expertise:

Experienced-based thinking is different from analysis-based thinking. The two aren’t opposed to each other; they are complementary, like daytime vision and night vision. Experience-based thinking isn’t the absence of analysis. It’s the application of all that we have encountered and learned.

This book is provocative in the way that it begins by listing 10 common beliefs about good decision making and then proceeds to tear down and replace them one by one. When you read this list, which follows, you might be surprised that anyone would question the merits of these popular beliefs.

1. Teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully.
2. Decision biases distort our thinking.
3. To make a decision, generate several options and compare them to pick the best one.
4. We can reduce uncertainly by gathering more information.
5. It’s bad to jump to conclusions-wait to see all the evidence.
6. To get people to learn, give them feedback on the consequences of their actions.
7. To make sense of a situation, we draw inferences from the data.
8. The starting point for any project is to get a clear description of the goal.
9. Our plans will succeed more often if we ID the biggest risks and find ways to eliminate them.
10. Leaders can create common ground by assigning roles and setting ground rules in advance.

You should read this book, so I won’t steal its thunder by revealing too much. I do, however, want to give you a feel for its contents. Here are three excepts to whet your appetite:

In complex and ambiguous situations, there is no substitute for experience…We put too much emphasis on reducing errors and not enough on building expertise.

A number of studies have shown that procedures help people handle typical tasks, but people do best in novel situations when they understand the system they need to control. People taught to understand the system develop richer mental models than people taught to follow procedures.

Smart technologies can make us stupid…What I am criticizing is decision-support systems that rely on shaky claims and misguided beliefs about how people think and what they need.

If you’re familiar with my work, you’ll notice that Klein and I both have a love-hate relationship with technology. When properly designed, decision-support technologies can serve as tools that help us think, but they can’t think for us. Relying on them too heavily and for the wrong things are common mistakes today. To use information technology effectively, we must know what computers do well and what people do well, and seamlessly interweave the strengths of both.

Take the time to read Streetlights and Shadows. It is filled with important and at times surprising insights and Klein’s prose and many stories are just plain fun to read.

Take care,

Good products are usually developed by good companies. It would be difficult for a bad company—one that is poorly run—to develop a good product. When we evaluate products, in addition to looking at the products themselves, we can learn useful facts that might not be obvious by asking a few questions about the companies that produce them. Here are a few questions you might want to ask about a software vendor when evaluating one of its products.

• Does the vendor have deep expertise in the domains that its products support? Does it exhibit this expertise, not only in its products, but in its communications as well, including marketing materials and sales presentations?
• Does the vendor invest in the development of features and functions in its products that actually work and are actually needed by more than a few users?
• Does the vendor exhibit a commitment to designing products to be as easy as possible to use?
• Does the vendor develop products that nudge users in beneficial directions (that is, in directions that actually produce results that effectively serve their needs)?
• Has the vendor defined its potential users clearly enough and gotten to know them well enough to develop the product in relevant ways?
• Does the vendor refrain from making marketing claims that are false or otherwise misleading?
• Does the vendor know how to tell the story of what its product does, how it works, and why it’s good? If it doesn’t, this is a sign that it doesn’t have a clear story to direct its efforts into a coherent product.
• Does the vendor make it easy for potential buyers to evaluate its products?
• Does the vendor help its users develop the conceptual skills (not just skills in using the software) that are necessary to use its products productively? For example, if it produces data analysis software, does it offer instruction in the principles and practices of analysis?
• Does the vendor take the time to develop user documentation that is really helpful, with clear explanations and meaningful examples?
• Does the vendor’s support mechanism (phone support, etc.) demonstrate that it genuinely wants to solve your problems rather than only provide the minimum support that customers will find tolerable?

I’m not suggesting that these are the only questions to ask about vendors. These are just a few that come to mind that could prove useful. Please feel free to add to and refine this list.

Take care,

The High Performance HMI Handbook
A Comprehensive Guide to Designing, Implementing and Maintaining Effective HMIs for Industrial Plant Operations

Bill Hollifield, Dana Oliver, Ian Nimmo, and Eddie Habibi, PAS, 2008

Dashboard displays come in many types, depending on the nature of the information that’s being monitored. While it’s true that all monitoring displays share many best design practices in common, each situation requires specialized designs as well. For example, an airplane cockpit display should look and function quite a bit differently than a business sales dashboard. A book entitled The High Performance HMI Handbook (2008) provides design guidance specifically for displays that are used by control operators in industrial plants. (HMI is an acronym for “Human Machine Interface”.) Apparently, the vendors that develop these systems are like most business intelligence vendors: they don’t understand how to present information effectively, especially for data monitoring and analysis. In fact, they promote really bad data presentation practices. Here’s an example of a typical industrial control room display.

If you’ve read my book Information Dashboard Design and now go on to read The High Performance HMI Handbook by Bill Hollifield, Dana Oliver, Ian Nimmo, and Eddie Habibi, you might think that either they or I copied the other’s material. When I wrote my book in 2006, however, I wasn’t familiar with the work of these authors, and I have no reason to believe that they were familiar with mine when they wrote their book last year. The reason the principles and practices presented in our books are so consistent with one another-in many cases down to precise details-is because we are drawing from the same research literature (human factors, human-computer interface design, cognitive science, information visualization, graphic design, etc.) and have both honed our expertise through years of designing practical, real-world data display solutions.

Where our books vary is due to differences between business dashboard requirements and displays that are used to monitor real-time industrial operations. Their book is rich in details that apply specifically to control room monitoring, down to the ideal configuration of display devices and the screen colors that provide optimal readability in a typical control room. It is because of the highly specific and therefore limited nature of this book’s audience that it bears the high price tag of $129.99. If you need to design displays for control operators, however, this price is a pittance compared to the benefits that you’ll derive from reading this book.

Let me share a few brief excerpts from the book to give you a peek into its contents.

Regarding the ineffective and irresponsible data display practices of the vendors that develop Distributed Control System (DCS) software:

There is a widespread need for the information in this book. It is not provided by the DCS manufacturers. In fact, the DCS manufacturers usually demonstrate their graphic capabilities using example displays violating almost every good practice for HMIs.

DCS vendors have now provided the capability of creating HMIs with extremely high sophistication, power, and usefulness. Unfortunately, this capability is usually unused, misused, or abused. The basic principles of effective displays are often not known or followed. Large amounts of process data are provided on graphics, but little information. Information is “data in context made useful.” In many cases, the DCS buyer will proceed to design and implement graphics based on the flashy examples created to sell the systems - unaware from a usability and effectiveness point of view, they are terrible.

Sound familiar? This next excerpt will sound familiar as well. Just as business intelligence vendors promote do-it-yourself solutions without providing the guidance that people need to analyze and present data effectively, DCS manufacturers leave it to companies to design their own control displays.

We would think it strange if Boeing sold jetliners with empty cockpits, devoid of instruments logically and consistently arranged for use by the pilot. Imagine if they suggested, “Just get your pilots together and let them design their own panel. After all, they’ll be using it.”

Imagine if your car came with a blank display screen and a manual on how to create lines, colors, and shapes so you could build your own speedometer. While this might actually appeal to the technical audience of this book, the rest of the world would think it strange and unacceptable. And, could you operate your car by using the “Doom” display motif created by your teenage son?

This do-it-yourself approach, without consistent guidance, is the general case with industrial graphics and is a major reason the results are often poorly conceived, inconsistent, and generally of low quality and performance.

Here’s a short quote that will grab your attention.

A graphic optimally designed for running a process and handling abnormal conditions effectively will, in fact, look boring.

Effective monitoring displays don’t “Wow” people with immediate graphical appeal. People often look at my dashboard designs and think “Where are the colors and those cute gauges that I like so much?” Here are a few of the characteristics that are listed as effective for HMI displays:

• Important information and Key Performance Indicators have embedded trends.
• There is no gratuitous animation.
• There is very limited use of color and alarm colors are used only to display alarms and nothing else…Bright, intense (saturated) color is used only for quickly drawing the operator’s attention to abnormal conditions and alarms. If the process is running correctly, the screen should display little to no color.
• Equipment is depicted in a simple 2-D low-contrast manner, rather than brightly colored 3-D vessels with shadowing.
• Layout is generally consistent with the operator’s mental model of the process.

This is all that I’ll share as a glimpse into The High Performance HMI Handbook. If you’re responsible for designing effective industrial control system displays, $129.99 is a small price to pay for the useful guidance in this book.

Take care,