Working on a marketing dashboard? Choosing which user metrics and KPIs to put on your dashboard? Here is a fine series of posts about tracking user behavior and conversion metrics for online product marketing. AARRR – Product Marketing for Pirates is a post by 500 Hats as is User Experience is a Depth Metric, not a Breadth Metric.

Both articles focus on how to measure customer flow through an ecommerce experience and what the relevant metrics should be. The key idea is to measure the user’s engagement with your content and the website experience.

There are some very nice graphics in the articles. Here is a chart with example conversion metrics:

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Some fellow Dashboard Spies and I were discussing the rising popularity of Microsoft Sharepoint server for executive dashboard applications and the topic of conditional formatting and graphical red/green/yellow status indicators arose. Were dashboard traffic lights available in SharePoint right out-of-the-box?

We found this nice video demonstration of how to tweak the Sharepoint code so that you do get red/green/yellow lights on a simple list:

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Mapping tools, enterprise GIS and executive dashboard technologies and practices are combining in an exciting way to create feature-rich, yet intuitive interfaces for the presentation of business intelligence.  Here is a really good article on one company’s (Thetus Corporation) approach: Geospatial Knowledge Modeling – Connecting Discoveries, Locations and Predictive Models.

The real value of the article is the presentation of a solid knowledge discovery, abstraction and presentation framework. Here are  images of various models that I grabbed from their site:

The Knowlege Abstraction Model

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Today I posted a screenshot of a dashboard from the future, from the year 2035 according to its proud conceptualizers at the General Electric company. I actually posted the dashboard and provided my opinion of it over at the old url of the Dashboard Spy where I started off this collection of executive dashboards: http://dashboardspy.wordpress.com.  Click on that link to read the full post, but here is a look at the dashboard. It is meant to be used in a kitchen, believe it or not (actual that makes sense, it’s a GE Kitchen Dashboard – the new 2035 model.

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Getting back to the Dashboard Spy tradition of pointing out executive dashboard articles and stories that are timely and interesting, here is an article by WashingtonTechnology.com explaining how EDS pursues growth through innovation and simplification and the role of the executive dashboard.

EDS is really hot on productivity dashboards these days, it seems. The $20 billion company is focusing on innovative ways to increasing productivity both internally and for its clients. The innovation lies in the use of some very simple dashboards that measure the right metrics.

Unfortunately, this is yet another article that talks about dashboards but doesn’t illustrate the story with an actual screenshot. Why is that so common at The Dashboard Spy and so rare at other dashboard sites?

They do quote EDS President Rittenmeyer as saying “Life is Measurement”.  He has a three step approach to management and I suppose they extend to his executive dashboards and metrics: Interactive Visibility, Simplification and Automation.

He explains: ” There are metrics that are critical to success in any company. Unfortunately, most companies have pages and pages of tasks they measure, when only 5 or 6 are critical to the average company. If you can identify them and build around them, you can truly make a difference in terms of the business.”

Sounds good to me. I need to know what metrics EDS considers important. Time to put on the Dashboard Spy gear and snoop around. Stay tuned.

Tags: Productivity Dashboards, Company Metrics, EDS Dashboard Methodology, Dashboard Metrics, KPIs for Dashboards

Every enterprise dashboard user loves those red/yellow/green traffic light indicators to show performance status or project health, right? So how come Xcelsius, that rapidly growing excel-based dashboard tool, doesn’t provide dashboard lights out-of-box?

Well, thanks to the Dashboard Spy wannabe, Dashboard Guy, we get a link to a tutorial on how to create dashboard lights in Xcelsius such as these (I’ve clipped them into separate graphics in case you want to save them and use them on your dashboard mockups) :

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Lately the Dashboard Spy screenshot blog has been showing quite a few hospital dashboards, so I thought it wise to take a step back and examine the KPIs and measures that are commonly found on hospital dashboards. Over at the main Dashboard Spy site we have a post that lists these hospital management metrics.

Here is a high level categorization of the measurement domains for hospital dashboards:

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Designing successful executive dashboard layouts requires one to study as many digitial dashboards as possible. It is through flipping through as many dashboard examples from as many different companies, departments and use cases as possible that one can get a sense as to the different types of approaches to this highly visual art.

Today we look at a couple of dashboards from the world of QA testing. In particular, we look into the idea of participatory testing in the context of testing open source software. Continue reading →