A Checklist for Creating Data Products

Data is the new oil.

—Everyone (first by Clive Humby)

Treat data like money.

—Jim Davis (SAS CMO) in The Economist

Are you sitting on a gold mine—if only you could transform your unique data into a valuable, monetizable data product?

Over the years, we’ve worked with dozens of clients to create applications that refine data and package the results in a form users will love. We often talk with product managers early in the conception phase to help define the target market and end-user needs, even before designing interfaces for presenting and visualizing the data.

In the process, we’ve learned a few lessons and gathered many useful resources. The checklist shown in Figure A-1 is divided into four sections:

1. Audience—Understand the people who need your data.
2. Data—Define and enhance the data for your solution.
3. Design—Craft an application that solves problems.
4. Delivery—Transition from application to profitable product.

Think Like a Designer

By Ken Hilburn

Recently, Nancy Duarte participated in an interview with Jimmy Guterman of the MIT Sloan Management Review, which resulted in the article “How to Become a Better Manager by Thinking Like a Designer.” The quote that summarizes the article follows:

Often managers . . . rely heavily on data and information to tell the story and miss the opportunity to create context and meaning . . . leaving lots of room for interpretation, which can spawn multiple cycles and limit advancement.

It’s the same with information presentation. A focus on design at the beginning expands the ability to deliver context and meaning. But before you discount design as a concept for well, you know, “those artsy types,” keep in mind, as Nancy puts it:

Design is . . . crafting communications to answer audience needs in the most effective way.

What this means is that the more you focus on design, the more you’ll “speak” to your audience—which means you’ll be more effective with your data presentation. Remember, it’s about the audience, not you.

Here are some dashboard design principles that we use (with a few enhancements from Nancy’s interview) to make sure we become better information presenters by thinking like designers:

• Unity/harmony—A sense that everything in the application belongs together, resulting in a “whole” that is greater than the sum of the parts. All the elements complement, augment, and enhance, as opposed to distract and detract from each other.
  • Takeaway—Identify the problem you’re solving and make sure every element you place moves you closer to answering that question.
• Proximity/hierarchy—Things that are near each other are related. Hierarchy demonstrates relationships between items where appropriate. Proximity and hierarchy both provide tremendous contextual cues leading to better understanding.
  • Takeaway—Place related things near each other and separate unrelated things. Remember, dogs and cats don’t play well together.
• Clear space—White space in information display is important and too often overlooked. Maximizing dashboard real estate means creating places for the eye to “rest” so that the nonwhite space is more effective.
  • Takeaway—Use white space with proximity to help your viewers follow the story the information is telling.
• Balance—Dominant focal points either give the viewer a sense of comfort (balanced) or spur them to action (unbalanced). Nancy points out, “That does not mean all things must be in balance all the time. It is often effective to jar people and thereby effect a change in behavior or thought. Be aware, though, that once something has been thrown out of balance, it is the nature of the universe to find a new state of equilibrium.”
  • Takeaway—Make sure the primary focal points in your information presentation tell the viewer either “it’s ok, move on,” or “you need to do something.”
• Contrast—Contrast creates interest to focus attention or highlight differences. Again quoting from the article “The value of contrast lies neither in the black nor the white, but in the tension between them.”
  • Takeaway—Use Contrast to shift balance so the viewer focuses and acts more quickly.
• Proportion—More important elements deserve more real estate. It’s tempting to want to present an unbiased view of the data. However, as Amanda Cox of the NYT graphics department stated at the OEDC seminar “Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge,” ”Data isn’t like your kids, you don’t have to pretend to love them equally.”
  • Takeaway—Increase the size and emphasis of the values and decrease the size of labels and you’ll find dramatically better impact and speed of understanding.
• Simplicity—Stay focused on the specific fact on which you’re trying to shine light. This sometimes means showing less data and a simpler display. I think Garr Reynolds sums it up best: “Don’t confuse ‘simplicity,’ which is hard to achieve, with ‘simplistic,’ which is easy and usually lacking value.”
  • Takeaway—Help your viewers focus on what’s actually important by pointing them to the kernels and not the chaff.

Designed to Be Used

By Ken Hilburn

I have become curiously interested in a recent blog post that talks about how it’s difficult to correctly write an application for the iPhone. The assertion is that writing software for the iPhone is harder than for a desktop, not because of the technology, but because “everything counts so much — every design choice, every line of code, everything left in and everything left out.”¹

Very eloquently and precisely put. If you’ve ever used any sort of mobile computing platform, not just the iPhone, you know how much proper design can make an application really useful—or totally useless.

But then again, isn’t this the case with any application? Some applications seem to have their genesis in the charter “build an application that allows the user to perform all these actions,” whereas others are built on the charge “build an application that helps the user solve this problem”—it’s the battle of functionality versus purpose.

We put together a short list of some design principles that we use to keep the user productive:

• Solve a problem—Make sure the end product provides a specific solution to a specific problem so that users can easily understand how it helps them.
• Enable casual use—Minimize the “barrier to entry” for new users by avoiding feature overload, minimizing clicks for each task, and not letting polish become bling.
• Tell a story—Relate the data to the key questions, answering them in a logical order and revealing layers of detail as users express interest in knowing more, not before.
• Lead to action—Empower users to finish their task quickly. (The “task” is not “using software.”)
• Encourage exploration—Use the experienced guide approach to give users enough context to understand the problem and then point them in the right direction to learn about new factors that can expand their insight.

Breaking Free of the One-Page Dashboard Rule

By Zach Gemignani

Conventional wisdom says that an executive dashboard must fit on a single page or screen. The argument hinges on a pair of assertions about this constraint: It provides necessary discipline to focus on only the most critical information, and it enables the audience to see results “at a glance.”

The “discipline” argument is made forcefully by Avinash Kaushik (among others).

If your dashboard does not fit on one page, you have a report, not a dashboard. . . . This rule is important because it encourages rigorous thought to be applied in selecting the golden dashboard metric.²

I buy wholeheartedly into the value of constraints. However, defining a useful constraint as a “rule” assumes there is only one viable means to achieve the desired ends. Confining visual real estate is just one way to focus your thinking. There are others: How about limiting yourself to five key measures? How about demanding that a dashboard can be understood in 3 minutes by a new user? How about presenting only exceptions?

The argument that a one-page dashboard necessarily provides a view of your business “at a glance” is more self-deceiving. Well-known information-ista Stephen Few uses this rationale in his definition of a dashboard:

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.³

I check my speedometer “at a glance.” I “glanced” at a Heads-up Display (HUD) on a video game showing how much energy my character has remaining. These displays communicate a single number that is already hovering on the corner of my consciousness. If we follow this advice literally, we’d show this (Figure A-2).

Assuming one page gives you quick, easy comprehension is like assuming all red cars are fast. That’s simply not true. More often, people follow the one-page dashboard rule off a cliff, cluttering up the page with pie charts, line and bar graphs, and a series of gauges that display information from a variety of sources.

There are real problems with this definition of a dashboard, as shown in Figure A-3.

In reality, the one-page rule leads to jamming information into the available space. When everything must fit on a page, there isn’t room to describe the connections between information or fashion a story from the data. A good dashboard raises more questions than it can answer. Sticking to a static piece of paper limits any ability to find or present explanations.

Don’t get me wrong: A one-page dashboard is often an effective way to create “a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives.” But with streaming video, interactive visualizations, podcasts, Kindles, smartphones, video projectors . . . is it necessary to limit ourselves to an 8.5˝ x 11˝ piece of paper? Or might we open ourselves up to some more creative solutions to sharing the numbers: a short movie, a few slides, a short text narrative, or 140 characters.

I’d like to use this definition instead, as shown in Figure A-4.

Dashboard Alerts Checklist

By Zach Gemignani

The tendency with reporting, and information dashboard design in particular, is to cram as much information on the page as possible. It is a problem that Avinash describes with typical candor:

This [is] one of the core reasons why most dashboards are “crappy,” i.e., they are data pukes that provide little in terms of context and even less in terms of actionable value.

In the past, we have offered tools to make data presentation as clear as possible (chart chooser and Excel chart cleaner). Sometimes, clean isn’t enough; a more dramatic approach is needed.

One alternative is to shift the focus from the full data to changes in the most critical data points. By pulling out the important exceptions, you can make it easier for your audience to digest what matters and take action.

Stephen Few says in his book Information Dashboard Design (O’Reilly Media, 2006):

The best way to condense a broad spectrum of information to fit onto a dashboard is in the form of summaries and exceptions . . . given the purpose of a dashboard to help people monitor what’s going on, much of the information it presents is necessary only when something unusual is happening; something that falls outside the realm of normality, into the realm of problems and opportunities. Why make someone wade through hundreds of values when only one or two require attention? We call these critical values exceptions.

Alerts are one mechanism to turn the focus to the exceptions, outliers, and data highlights. Whether embedded in the dashboard or presented separately, alerts can be the extra layer of abstraction that make a dashboard useful. Unfortunately, they are hard to get right. I’ve arrived at four C’s for effective alerts—context, cogency, communication, and control. Here’s a checklist to consider as you build alerts into a dashboard or report: