Dashboard

In making the ROI case for any IT project or application development project, we like to talk about the productivity that the new system will bring. The usual case was to count up how many hours a task or workflow takes if done manually and compare it to the drastically reduced number of hours it will take when the system goes online. Well, most critical business processes have already been automated and how the discussion of productivity is measured in a finer fashion. We now count clicks and measure usability.

Let’s take a look at the issue of productivity when it comes to business dashboard use.

We begin with a look at productivity as defined in 1776 by Adam Smith in the famous book, The Wealth of Nations.

Smith defined productivity by dividing labor into two broad categories - productive labor and unproductive labor. According to Smith, productive labor was work which fixed value into tangible objects. Unproductive labor, on the other hand, was any work where the value was consumed as soon as it was created. The example given by Smith was the role of laborers in a manufacturing plant (who transferred their value through work into their output) versus the tasks of a servant (unproductive work).

Now let’s apply this to software applications in general and business dashboards in particular.

For a case study, let’s use the Google Analytics service, the wildly popular free service offerred by Google to allow tracking of website visitor analytics.

With its vast user base of web masters, the Google Analytics Dashboard is probably the most often-used business dashboard. Certainly, outside of the enterprise, it is often the first real BI dashboard encountered by the general public.

Here’s a screenshot of the first page of the Google Analytics Dashboard:

Yes, that’s Avinash Kaushik’s Google Analytics Dashboard. Avinash is Google’s web analytics evangelist and a real fan of dashboards. We previously posted a video of Avinash on Dashboards.

Anyway, the dashboard allows drill-down to many different views. Here are a couple of little thumbnails.

Getting back to the idea of productivity of dashboards, the Google Analytics Dashboard has evolved quite a bit since the introduction of the service back in 2005. If you dig out some older dashboards, you can see how advances in dashboard design has incrementally increased productivity for users of the dashboard.

But what about larger jumps in productivity?

Well, take a look at this third-party offering by Serence called the Klipfolio for Google Analytics.

Here’s a screen shot of their desktop dashboard:

Uh, well… so what?… you may ask. There’s nothing earth-shaking about this little dashboard. It’s simply a summary dashboard with the typical red/green/yellow status lights.

Actually, the big deal is where this little dashboard goes. It’s a desktop dashboard.

If you are reading this post on the main page of the Dashboards by Example site, click on the “read more” link below to continue reading.

As mentioned before, desktop dashboards extend the idea of desktop widgets and gadgets to place business intelligence a layer above the typical web-based dashboard. These desktop dashboards nicely address the Rule of Placement as noted in The Three Rules of Dashboard Design.

The idea is that the desktop is the first, last, and constant thing that the business user sees while working during the day. Why not leverage that pervasiveness and place the dashboard right where they can see it all the time. No need to click on anything to launch a desktop app or a browser. Just log in and get your business intelligence served to you.

In terms of the work a dashboard does, gathering the data, assembling it into the correct metrics and displaying the KPIs in a usable manner is all productive work. Obviously, then, having the user constantly log into their application and navigating to see their KPIs and metrics is throw away motion. Why suffer that non-productive effort?

The creators of the Klipfolio Google Analytics dashboard must have been very tuned in to the countless number of times webmasters have to bring up their web browsers, sign on into their Google Analytics accounts and navigate to their pages just to start their analysis.

Putting their dashboard right on the desktop represents a big jump in productivity.

Here are some ways you can drill down on the data from the desktop dashboard:

I think that changing the location of the dashboard can bring about a significant increase in productivity for the Google Analytics dashboard. Certainly, it takes away the aggravation of logging in each time, but if, even once, you notice a metric that you would have otherwise missed because you weren’t logged in, it’s worth it. What do you think?

Tags: Dashboard Design, Rule of Placement, Productivity and Business Intelligence Dashboards, Klipfolio, Klipfolio Screenshots, Klipfolio for Google Analytics Dashboard, Desktop Dashboards

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2 Responses to “Making Dashboards More Productive - Google Analytics Dashboard Case Study”

1. Jon Peltier Said on June 2nd, 2008 at 3:49 pm quote

   Thanks for the link to Klipfolio.

2. mr tom Said on June 3rd, 2008 at 3:06 am quote

   I like this. Whilst there are pretty bits, it manages to be simple and clear.

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Last Modified: Sunday, July 27th, 2008 @ 21:09

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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