Google Apps Status Dashboard

Posted on February 27, 2009 by Dashboard Spy

Dashboard Spy Design Topic: No Eye Candy for the Google Apps Dashboard.

Google’s latest dashboard allows users to monitor the availability of the various Google Apps services such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Calendar, Google Video and Google Talk. The application health status dashboard was launched on February 26, 2009 as part of Google’s effort to increase transparency and communication with users of its Google Apps services.

Let’s take a quick look at the background behind the new Google Apps Dashboard and then focus on some elements of its user interface design.

The release of the Apps Status Dashboard follows the high profile outage of Gmail two days earlier when the email service was down for almost 3 hours. An analyst reported on the public outcry:

“The problem with services like Gmail is that every outage is highlighted in the press, and rightfully so,” said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc., in an interview earlier this week. “The companies pitch these services as dependable and easy substitutes for higher-cost alternatives, but a widespread and long-lasting outage like this really hurts that claim. While some people might shrug off a failure like this, it can cause real hardships for some users and have an impact on their lives and businesses.”

In a Google Apps blog post, the rationale behind the Google Apps Status Dashboard was given as:

“We made a commitment last year to increase transparency and communication with Google Apps customers in several ways. We heard your feedback around the need for better communication when issues like Tuesday’s Gmail outage occur. The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it’s also relevant to users of our consumer products.”

Here’s a screenshot of the Google Apps Status Dashboard. Use that link or click on the dashboard screenshot to get to the actual dashboard itself.

As you see, it’s a very straight-forward dashboard design with one main table. Each row represents a Google service with some simple icons indicating application health status. The meaning of four simple icons is displayed via a legend at the bottom of the table. The left most column shows today’s status with the subsequent columns showing the status of the previous 6 days. There is an “Older” link to toggle to last week’s data. Clicking on an icon brings you to a detail page that documents issues specific to the Google App.

Here is the data for Tuesday’s Gmail outage:

Gmail Status Dashboard

And here is a dashboard screen showing problems with Google Calendar:

Google Apps Dashboard

Getting back to my original purpose for displaying this Google Apps dashboard, let’s take a look at this from the perspective of graphic design. [Click on the "More" link for that discussion]

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Open Dashboard Methodology

Posted on February 19, 2009 by Dashboard Spy

As we gain hands-on experience with the design, implementation, launch and maintenance of business intelligence dashboards, we accumulate best practices and design patterns that we can rely upon and toss aside activities that lead us astray. After several dashboard projects, we come to realize the value of a dashboarding methodology. Of course, when discussing business dashboard best practices in collaborative environments such as this blog, Dashboards By Example, digital dashboard practitioners quickly realize that by joining together and sharing their experiences they can shortcut the dashboard development process and ensure better results. Learning from each other’s pitfalls and successes by sharing methodologies becomes the route to better and more useful dashboards.

In this spirit of open collaboration, The Dashboard Spy invites you to join a newly-formed initiative called The Open Dashboard Methodology Group.

The brainchild of dashboard veteran and Dashboard Spy reader Tomas Greif, the ODMG will strive to provide an open collection of dashboard design and implementation methodology steps.

As Tomas first wrote to me and other dashboard practitioners,

Do you know of any good dashboarding methodology? Is there anything like CRISP-DM for dashboards? (CRISP-DM is publicly available methodology for data mining). If not, would it be interesting for you to create a platform-independent, publicly-available methodology for dashboards design and development? I would love to start or join such an activity. It would be a great asset to the business intelligence dashboarding community. I have already identified over 40 steps/tasks you need to complete to create a good dashboard and I am sure the list is not exhaustive.

I worked with Tomas on some initial brainstorming for the effort and we are now ready to start assembling the troops! We are looking for individuals willing and able to leverage their years of dashboard experience to contribute to a comprehensive dashboarding methodology. Whether you are a dashboard user, analyst, designer or programmer, we need your knowledge of the dashboarding process!

Please visit the LinkedIn group called Open Dashboard Methodology

Here are some more details:

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a complete dashboarding methodology that documented all the techniques and processes learned from years of implementing business dashboards? Well, let’s put one together! Our goal is to create an open and platform-independent methodology for business dashboard design and implementation. We are looking for members who are willing to participate in this effort by contributing their business intelligence dashboarding skills and experience. We would love to have people with different backgrounds on board so whether you are an analyst, business user, designer, programmer or software vendor, you are welcome. If you feel you can contribute to the development of this open dashboarding methodology, join us! This project is non-profit and in the spirit of open source. The results will be available at no cost for everyone. The only benefits we can offer are: your company will be listed in the document, you will be listed as either author or contributor, and you will work with some great people who share your passion in dashboards.

Please join us in this exciting collaboration. Aren’t you interesting in seeing the steps we’ve come up with so far for business intelligence dashboarding?

For more information, come visit the LinkedIn group.

You can also link to Tomas Greif or Hubert Lee (that’s me, The Dashboard Spy!) and we’ll give you more information.

Interaction Design Principles

Posted on February 16, 2009 by Dashboard Spy

Dashboard Design Topic: Principles of Interaction Design for Dashboard Designers.

Dashboard designers and builders often back into the disciples of user interface and interaction design through necessity after a few business intelligence projects. Once they get a few dashboard projects under their belt, they realize that there are quite a few subtleties in a dashboard project beyond selecting metrics and applying information visualization best practices. Some come to the realization sooner than others. Those building a custom application with a dashboard tend to need to deal with interaction design issues sooner than those leveraging dashboard software platforms with their built-in user interface layouts and components. Either way, dashboard designers realize that they are building a user interface and need to apply fundamentals and principles that assure user satisfaction and acceptance.

Dashboard Spy readers tend to be a diverse lot with a variety of job functions and backgrounds. Even their learning styles are different. Usually we focus on the visual learners by showing numerous screenshots and image. Today’s post on Interation Design Prinicples is designed to appeal to those listening learners as well by using video content. As you know there is a Dashboard Spy site, Dashboards.TV, that collects video content regarding business intelligence dashboarding resources. From that library of videos comes today lecture on Interaction Design Principles. It’s a great resource that all dashboard designers should review.

From the O”Reilly Webcast, comes this 1 1/2 hour long presentation on the principles of interaction design. It reviews the six design patterns that are critical for designing web interfaces. The video is embedded below, but you may wish to view the high resolution version at youtube. The content is presented by Bill Scott, the director of UI engineering at netflix and follows the book titled Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions

I took the following notes during my viewing of this video:

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When Dashboards Are Not Enough

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Dashboard Spy

As much as digital dashboards rock my world, I have to keep in mind that business intelligence is much more than a dashboard. In terms of that old tired metaphor, if a dashboard shows me the metrics of my vehicle in a small location right in front of me, then business intelligence is everything else that I need to know – the view around the car, the view out the windshield, the sound of the engine, etc. In this example, the dashboard alone is not sufficient for me to drive the car. I need the additional input of the world around me to get to my destination.

Wait a minute, you say, pilots can fly by instrumentation alone. Ha! Take that, you Dashboard Spy you! I would reply that a pilot has a full cockpit. If you were to apply that analogy to a business dashboard, then you have to go beyond a simple one page, read-only dashboard and include business intelligence application functionality that can provide control and feedback. Your enhanced business cockpit would include what-if analytics, modeling etc.

I bring this up today because of a very interesting post from the UK. Data Monkey is a marketing analyst fond of bananas and dashboards. See photo:

Data Monkey’s post on Why a Dashboard Won’t Solve All of Your Problems is a good read that reminds us not to be seduced by all that data out there:

Business Intelligence (BI) has come of age. Assuming your IT department knows roughly what they’re doing and you can afford it, you can have your latest sales, market share, media spend, Google conversion rates and any other metrics you care to mention on your screen on a Monday morning.

More information is incredibly seductive. If you had your sales and media spend histories at your fingertips, you could show the effectiveness of your current advertising campaign. Surely? Couldn’t you?

Well actually, no you couldn’t. Marketing analysts have had this data for ages and it takes them a couple of months (and a degree in statistics) to work it out.

His bottom line is that a dashboard can only show basic information:

As analysts, we’re often the ones selling dashboards, so lets be honest about what they do well. They show data. So to be useful, you have to be someone who needs to see that data – and I mean really needs to see it. Just the number. Not why the number, or where it came from, or what you might want to do about it.

Anything that goes beyond looking at a number isn’t a dashboard, it’s insight and analysis.

Be sure to read his post for more.

I’ve added Data Monkey’s blog, Wallpapering Fog: An analyst’s thoughts on the marketing industry to the information visualization section of The Dashboard Spy’s List of Experts.

What do you think?

Regards Hubert Lee, The Dashboard Spy

Tags: Business Intelligence Dashboards, Data Monkey, Dashboard Metrics

Quiz Results Dashboard

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Dashboard Spy

Business intelligence dashboards are usually serious affairs, with plenty of ominous red lights, tons of squiggly lines and stuffy disclaimers in tiny text. So, it’s always nice when a Dashboard Spy reader sends in a dashboard with a bit of whimsy.

Aaron Lyon (monkeymatic.com) is a skilled designer that was tasked to provide a leaderboard that tracked the results of a quiz. He came up with a design for a real-time scoreboard that is both entertaining and intuitive.

A software company held a sales kickoff conference where 300 sales reps submitted SMS messages via mobile phones to answer quiz questions. Points were tallied by an administrator and entered into an HTML admin screen. The data was displayed on a real-time results dashboard that was shown on large video screens at the conference. Aaron leveraged a “Grand Prix Leaderboard” motif to great effect as you see here:

Quiz Results Leaderboard

The Formula 1 cars move across the screen as the results are received and tallied. A fun dashboard!

Tags: dashboard design, Survey results dashboard, flash dashboard, excel dashboard.

Dashboard Overload

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Dashboard Spy

Hello, my name is the Dashboard Spy and I’m a dashboard-aholic. Yes, I’ve looked at thousands of dashboards and I think they’re all wonderful. And, if you’re like most of my readers and involved in the design, implementation or management of business dashboards, I bet you also think that they are the best thing since the pie chart.

BUT, if you are a dashboard USER, there may be times when you think that you’re getting too much of a good thing. It may be that you are getting overwhelmed by all the enthusiastic dashboarders in your company.

Horrors! I’ve said it. Dashboards are too much of a good thing? But, Mr. Dashboard Spy, have you lost your mind?

Take a look at the wonderful post titled The Great Dashboard Cleanup Project on the blog Force Monkey by JP Seabury.

salesforce.com dashboard

JP Seabury tells the tale of how he downloaded the Salesforce.com AppExchange Dashboard Pack and created a snowballing dashboard phenomenon at his company. A good thing, right? His regret now, however, is that these dashboards have taken over and that there is a misplaced emphasis on the dashboard as a tool rather than the business intelligence they should provide.

Very early in our implementation of Salesforce.com, I wanted to show the power of Dashboards to my users. I downloaded AppExchange Dashboard Pack 1.0. The application is free, and installs all of the many dashboards published by Salesforce Labs. The package had dashboards for every conceivable use: lead flow, marketing campaign metrics, sales forecasting, support KPI, sales / support rep performance tracking, document tab tracking, user adoption, data quality analytics … everything.

I downloaded the app, did a little tweaking (very little), and then published the dashboards to my users. When Summer’08 Release gave us the ability to email dashboards (as an HTML page) directly to users, I enabled that functionality for a few key managers and user groups, too.

Soon after, I saw copies of dashboards distributed at various meetings and screenshots of dashboard components included in PowerPoint presentations. Managers and executives looked forward to their daily, weekly and/or monthly Dashboard emails, and talked animatedly about them in the halls or at company meetings. I felt good.

Yet something was wrong. I couldn’t quite place my finger on what it was, but the monster was there, elusive. The users asked for more dashboards, more pretty graphs, charts, tables, and I appeased them. Today, we have more than 50 different dashboards and hundreds of reports feeding those dashboards. It’s an absolute glut of information. And this monster I created now has a name: Data Admiration.

They come to the CRM tool, very excited about the volumes of data and information captured in our Salesforce Dashboards. They drink deep from the kool-aid. But none of these dashboards seem to drive any real change in the organization. Why not?

Check out his post to read his reflection on why this mass dashboard adoption seemed hollow.

Interestingly, one of his readers provided a comment on the proliferation of dashboards and the required Dashboard Cleanup Project done at his company:

I’m not really in to reports and dashboards, but I’d just like to share some horrifying numbers with you: Before our large cleanup project started 6 months ago we had roughly 6000 reports feeding little over 1000 dashboards, all thrown out in folders without any naming convention of any kind.

Now we’re a bit better off, especially because the folders have been organized by area and we have a central team handling everything that has to do with reports.

1,000 dashboards at his company? Wow.

Please share any stories regarding dashboards running amok at your company.

PS. The above screenshot shows a sales performance dashboard. For an interesting look at how to deploy sales metric dashboads using the PC Desktop Widget approach, see: Salesforce dashboard

Regards Hubert Lee The Dashboard Spy

Tags: Dashboard Adoption, Dashboard Implementation

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Monthly Archives: February 2009