Donald Norman is well known in the field of design. For many years he has been helping designers become aware of the qualities that must exist in products for people to use them effectively. As a cognitive psychologist, Norman bases his recommendations on an understanding of the human mind—both its strengths and its limitations. Well […]

I was recently informed by the folks at Bissantz and Company, makers of the product SparkMaker, that they have added the ability to display sparklines as tickers in the new version of the product. They asked for my opinion of this new feature. While watching their examples crawl across the screen, I couldn’t help but […]

Blogs, by their very nature, tend to be provocative, especially those that are written by industry leaders (sometimes called “thought leaders”). Opinions are often expressed with passion. This is certainly true of my blog. In fact, I tend to communicate in this way in all venues (blog posts, articles, books, presentations, classes, and even conversation […]

The sad truth is, most BI vendors don’t understand business intelligence, and they never will until customers demand software that really works. As long as you don’t know what you need or are easily taken in by flashy screens that provide a level of intelligence that’s geared for toddlers, the vendors will continue to crank […]

Today, I was briefed on a new software product (not SalesAdvizor, which I’ll get to shortly), which provides dashboard and visual analysis functionality. During the course of the briefing, I occasionally asked if they were planning to provide particular visual analysis features that I consider not only useful but essential. A common response was, “We’ve […]