The Sales Analysis tab has many poor display choices and some good ones. Too much information is crammed onto the sheet. Although the months and years are readily visible, thus inviting selections and matching the display of the KPIs tab so that there is continuity between sheets, the sheet does require scrolling to see the chart images at the bottom of the display. People tend to assume that, if scrolling is necessary, the information that is out of sight is of less importance than the information that is readily visible. The goal is to provide readily actionable information that is easy to see and understand. The designer has tried to mitigate this problem by adding text indicating that we need to scroll down the sheet (see the arrow near the top-left corner of the preceding screenshot), but that is generally considered a poor design choice.
Also, the spacing of the eight Quick Selections is incorrect, and we cannot see the name next to the quick selection bar for Country (see the oval near the top-right corner).
There are two straight tables displayed in the top half of the sheet:
- Segment Change in Revenue vs Last Year
- Customer Profitability 80:20
The first, Segment Change, has eight columns of data. The second, Customer Profitability, only has six but requires intensive scrolling to see the data by customer. In both tables, the data is displayed out to the 1 dollar unit rather than being rounded up to thousands or millions. This leads to the hard work of remembering and comparing numbers to figure out what is important in the information. Unfortunately, there is no quick way to change the display in QlikView between ones, thousands, and millions.
Once we scroll down the page to the chart display, we see two charts displaying basically identical information. The first shows a rolling 12-month average sales and margin % in line graph format. The second is a bar chart with the gross sales and margin that has a line graph going across the top of Margin %. Also, the "12 month" name of the first graph is a misnomer because there is only enough data to display 7 months of 2010 and 5 months of 2011, and only one year of data appears at a time with the default selection. You must choose both 2010 and 2011 to get 12 months to be displayed at the same time in the 12 Month Rolling Average line graph. To choose both years, hold down the Shift key and click each year in turn. And when you do select both years, Monthly Sales & Margin does not display the same comparison time period and doesn't tell us which year we are viewing.
Figure 5-2: Lower half of Sales Analysis sheet of Executive dashboard