The numbers are in. Despite the economy spending is projected to increase by 2.6% in IT. The better news for those in the Business Intelligence field is that projected spending is projected to grow at a rate of 8.1% in 2009, and that’s just on platforms! So why is Business Intelligence(BI) an afterthought? More specifically, why do organizations spend millions developing web portals, marketing, and user experience but skimp on ugly BI presentations? How many of IT organizations have scores of reports, but limited adoption rates? Can UX designers help with the beginning of BI 2.0?
I write this as someone who manages a developer team and a BI team. What I’ve noticed is that the best practices of UI design have not filtered down to BI. Why? I believe that there are four main reasons:
1) BI is somehow perceived as ‘less sexy’. After all, It’s just a list of information already entered.
2) A lack of understanding about how people view and consume data. Especially large amounts.
3) Failure to see BI as an ‘experience’.
4) Generally the design is left to the ‘Engineer’.
The first reason, that somehow BI is perceived as ‘less sexy’, is probably due to a few reasons. First and foremost it’s the tool sets that are offered. Most BI tools do not allow CSS, or their standard graphics and control packages are something less than desirable. However, in the last few years there’s been a surge in third party controls that give BI platforms such as Reporting Services the ability to make and design eye popping presentations. Additionally the IDE’s are generally difficult to work with and lack common tool sets to encourage design centric solutions.
Number two and number three on this list is related. UX designers will focus on design sessions that utilize eye tracking software, mouse tracking and analyze web log information to death. But when was the last time you ever heard of this happening in terms of BI? Do users consume data differently in BI than they do on a webpage? I would argue not really. It’s just a different view. You still need to highlight what the important information is in the view, and make it easy for the user to figure out what ‘action’ they need to take. Action being the key word here. Often times I see BI presentations where the end product just spits out a listing of information. Not really helpful. If you must ‘list’ then at least have a ‘dashboard’ like presentation in the header to help me instantly understand what information is present. I call this the 15 second rule. If your end user can’t figure out what information is on the report, what’s good about it, and what’s bad then the ‘report’ has failed the usability test.
The last point, design is left to the Engineer, is not really a surprise. As an Engineer, and I think I speak for most Engineers, I personally take no offense to it and I’m quite aware of my shortcomings as a designer. That’s why we have UX!
Recently I had the pleasure of working with a BI UX specialist, David Crandall. Talk about an eye opening experience. You don’t realize how bad something is until you see it done correctly.
I asked Dave how he sums up the current state of BI UX design. He replied:
“The customer can have any color he wants so long as it’s black.” – Henry Ford in regards to the Model T.
Even though the data might be life changing, those tons of reports are often tons of ugly reports. We laugh to think that someone once thought that people would be happy with an ugly car, but we’ll throw millions of dollars at our company’s business intelligence and leave it ugly. Obviously “pretty” is not the whole solution, but it has to be considered a valid component when trying to convey information effectively.
I would recommend checking out Dave’s blog. Or if you want to see what I’m talking about in terms of rethinking BI presentation check out his resume marketing presentation. It’s data about Dave, just not like you would think (plus it uses Prezi which is an awesome service).
What are your experiences with BI? Are we devoting enough design time to it? Do you think we’ll ever see a Web 2.0 phenomenon in BI? One thing is for certain. We will need the UX folks onboard!