Enterprise Dashboard Digest

Dashboard Spy Topic: Business Intelligence Dashboard Navigation (dashboard example: Oracle Interactive Dashboards)

By their nature, business dashboards encourage users to adopt a “smorgasbord” approach to navigation. Since a dashboard lays out details, summaries and graphs all at the same time, user is invited to use a browsing style of search rather than the traditional “known search” model. A well designed dashboard lets a user “think” their way through a session and explore various drilldowns and links as ideas come to them.

Today we take a look at how navigation can be placed down at the data table level. Of course, business dashboard have all the usual navigation devices. You will find global navigation, application-level navigation, sub-navs, left side navigation, drill down navigation in the charts and graphs, etc.

But have you explored using the elements of your data tables as navigation aides? Think column headings, or actual data values as navigation jump-off points, for example.

Take a look at these screenshots of Oracle Interactive Dashboards (via the post Navigation – Dashboard by Valentin Macovei)

Here’s a screenshot of the Oracle dashboard showing a small navigational popup for a data value (see the data table at the bottom of the screen).

That was an example of navigation from a value in a cell in your data table. Pretty cool, right?

Oracle Interactive Dashboards allows other navigational points to be used as well. You can navigate from column headings and also from charts (as is typically seen in drill down charts).

Here’s a peek at the administration screen of Oracle Interactive Dashboards:

And, by the way, the navigation points pass along data values to the next dashboard screen when clicked.

The Dashboard Spy

Every dashboard needs to display the status of various KPIs and metrics, right? We’re all familiar with the red, green, yellow statuses as indicated by little icons.

Here are some of my favorites. Maybe they’ll be useful to you:

Be careful to think through what the colors mean. You may think that the meaning of green is totally clear, but here is an example where, to me at least, there is some confusion as to whether green means take an action or don’t take an action. You’ll see in this video that green actually means “No” in the context of whether or not to go ahead. Strange? Take a look.

This video is an advertisement for a device that monitors the temperature of water and displays the result in a “glanceable” manner. It’s what we call an ambient device. We’ve covered real-world dashboards and ambient devices on The Dashboard Spy previously. More on ambient devices after you watch the video.

Ambient devices are a new genre of consumer electronics characterized by their ability to be perceived at-a-glance (also called “glanceable”). Ambient devices utilize pre-attentive processing to display information: the ability for the brain to perceive information without any apparent cognitive load.

Take a look at this post on the Ambient Orb and the Ambient Dashboard:

http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/2006/03/10/the-ambient-executive-dashboard-a-physical-analog-gauge-that-you-can-hook-up-to-your-digital-dashboard/