Juice Analytics

Straight from the parallel universe where clever and horrible go together like peanut butter and chocolate comes the following press release:

We are excited to announce the launch of our new community website for Sears and Kmart customers. The service you originally registered with, My SHC Community is now called sk-YOU. The new name represents “Sears and Kmart, building a better relationship with you” and that is of course, part of our vision and mission. It is a growing and personalized online community currently comprised of 40,000 consumers who want to be heard. You can share ideas, opinions and thoughts on a wide variety of topics from travel to kitchen appliances and cell phone service. It enables you to provide feedback and guidance on the offers and shopping experiences that are most important to you.

I can see how this sounded wildly clever in a meeting.

Mash Sears, Kmart, and “you” all together and look what you get. It shows our commitment to the customer and it sounds like “sku”.

Bzzzt, horrible. People don’t care about stock keeping units—and they certainly don’t want to be associated with one. They don’t care about clever. Unless you’re a financier, there’s no reason to associate Sears with Kmart. Branding should help the you understand and remember a product. It’s not about how you perceive the customer or about how you perceive an internal initiative. The dash and all caps YOU makes it harder for the customer to remember. But I ramble.

At Juice, our naming bible is available in PDF form from Igor International.

http://www.igorinternational.com/process/naming-guide-product-company-names.php

The central wisdom of this guide—and it’s packed full of gems, naming taxonomies by industry, checklists, taglines, case studies—is that names fall into the following categories.

Descriptive names (names that describe what the product or company does)
BMW, IBM, AdWords

• Good for a product, easy to remember
• Rough sledding for a company name, as there will be dozens of companies in the field with similar names (unless you have 100 years of meticulous branding like BMW and IBM)

Invented names with latin roots

• Aquilent, Taligent, Acela, Agilent
• “Safe” choices, hard to remember, a blank slate. Generally too clever by half. Hey, did you think it was clever to name a company as a cross between “agile” and “intelligent”? Nobody cares!

Invented names that are fun to say

• Snapple, Oreo, Kodak
• Fun to say, opens the door for lots of positive associations with strong branding

Experiential names (names that describe the experience of the company or product)

• Navigator, Safari, TrailBlazer, Fidelity
• Intuitive but common, doesn’t differentiate, a workmanlike approach for a product

Evocative names (names that evoke feelings about the experience you will have with the company—those feelings may even be initially negative)

• Caterpillar, Apple, Amazon, AirPort, Target, Yahoo, Virgin
• Connects emotionally with people because they have lots of previous experience with the word. “Scary” choices that are hard to get a committee to agree to

We often are are asked why we’re named “Juice”—Igor is the answer. When we go places, people say “Heeey, Juice guys!”—if you’re a client, be aware you’re not the first one to use that line. We benefit from every dollar Nantucket Nectars spends on their “Juice Guys” ads and we love it. Every dollar Tropicana spends helps you remember our name. Even OJ Simpson is on our branding team.

If you’re naming an internal product, steer toward descriptive names or evocative names. If you’re creating a reporting portal, don’t be afraid to call it “Report Portal”. Or call it “Butterfly” or “Moonbeam.” Brighten people’s lives by delivering fun, or ease their lives by not making them remember some obscure acronym. Most of all, remember to be a servant of your customers and that clever is not equal to smart.

The tendency with reporting, and information dashboard design in particular, is to cram as much information on the page as possible. It is a problem that Avinash describes with typical candor:

“This one of the core reasons why most dashboards are ’crappy’, i.e. they are data pukes that provide little in terms of context and even less in terms of actionable value.”

In the past, we have offered tools to make data presentation as clear as possible (chart chooser, Excel chart cleaner). Sometimes clean isn’t enough; a more dramatic approach is needed.

One alternative is to shift the focus from the full data to changes in the most critical data points. By pulling out the important exceptions, you can make it easier for your audience to digest what matters and take action.

Stephen Few says in his book Information Dashboard Design:

“The best way to condense a broad spectrum of information to fit onto a dashboard is in the form of summaries and exceptions…given the purpose of a dashboard to help people monitor what’s going on, much of the information it presents is necessary only when something unusual is happening; something that falls outside the realm of normality, into the realm of problems and opportunities. Why make someone wade through hundreds of values when only one or two require attention? We call these critical values exceptions.”

Alerts are one mechanism to turn the focus to the exceptions, outliers and data highlights. Whether embedded in the dashboard or presented separately, alerts can be the extra layer of abstraction that make a dashboard useful. Unfortunately, they are hard to get right. I’ve arrived at four C’s for effective alerts—context, cogency, communication, control. Here’s a checklist to consider as you build alerts into a dashboard or report:

• Are the parameters well defined? An alert is commonly defined by the following factors: metric (e.g. revenue), dimension (e.g. time), delta (e.g month over month change), scope (e.g. Northeast region, Peanut-product line), threshold (e.g. increase or decrease of 10%).
• Is the timing of the alerts actionable? One client explained to us that fluctuations in many of their metrics make monthly alerts too frequent—it would unnecessarily alarm people when, from their perspective, no significant trend had been established.
• Is the change statistically significant? This is of particular importance when you are measuring deltas. A doubling of traffic from a referring site doesn’t mean much when it is moving from one to two visitors.

• Can the alerts be described in simple terms that even an executive can understand? Alerts should have a real-world meaning that users are familiar with. If an alert is based on a complex metric, for example, users will be confused as to the implications.
• Is the alert actionable? In the best cases, alerts should point users to both the drivers of the alert and the actions that can address the situation. This system does neither:
  ![terror warning system]
• Are the alerts so granular and/or frequently triggered that users will get alert fatigue? Excessive use of alerts will undermining their credibility. We saw this happen at one client where an IT-designed system threw off alerts like they were going out of style. The application went out of style the next year when users decided it was more distracting than useful. Here’s another example of a system that seems designed to raise blood pressure.

(It appears that a 5% increase in brand attribute performance isn’t good enough to get you out of the yellow.)

• Is the alert placed in context? Google Finance does a nice job of putting news alerts within the stock chart.
  
• Is it clear what the user should do next? Give the user a clear path to more information so they can understand the full context of the alert.
• Does the sophistication of your alerts match the sophistication of your audience? I’ve found that it is better to start with some simple alerts so your audience can begin to learn what they mean and how to react. Over time, these alerts can become more refined and focused to capture complex situations.
• Does the alert draw the eye without being visually overwhelming or annoying? Here’s a article about how to “reduce visual noise” in dashboards.
• Is color used appropriately? Red means bad. Yellow is sorta bad. Green means good (but “good” things don’t need to be alerts). It isn’t particularly fair for color blind folks, but these conventions are deeply rooted.
• Have you found the best mechanism for presenting alerts? Alerts can be sent through e-mail, as SMS message, blasted over the office intercom system, or posted to the wall in the bathroom. What is the most convenient and appropriate medium?

• Can the user identify the important alerts for them, and avoid the others? As hard as you may try in designing the dashboard or report, you aren’t in the shoes of the users. They will learn what they want to pay attention to and what information is extraneous.
• Can the user adjust the parameters? With more sophisticated dashboards, you want to give users the ability to adjust parameters to hone in on the exceptions that really require action.
• Can the user analyze alert frequency and trends? I’ve never seen a system that does this, but having the ability to view and analyze alert history seems critically important to getting a holistic view of performance.

Edward Tufte has produced a illuminating video tour of the user interface of the iPhone. The video illustrates Tufte’s struggles to come to grips with the difference between dynamic screen resolution and the resolution of printed paper. Tufte is prone to grandiose pronouncements, like this one:

All history of improvements in human communication is written in terms of improvements in resolution: to produce, for viewers of evidence, more bits per unit time, and more bits per unit area. Slideware is contrary to that history. Trading in reductions in resolution for user convenience or for pitching may be useful in mass market products or in commercial art, but not for technical communications. The solution is not to rescue slideware design; the solution is to use a different, better, and content-driven presentation method. On this solution, see our thread PowerPoint Does Rocket Science—and Better Techniques for Technical Reports — Tufte Nov 10 2006

Somehow, I don’t think the importance of the Gutenberg Bible related to it showing “more bits per unit area.” Quick, count the “bits per unit area.”

It didn’t take bits per unit area to revolutionize communication in the past and it won’t in the future either. The iPhone is a tremendously engaging information device and points the way forward for information displays. Here’s what the iPhone does well:

Maximize screen real estate: Controls are only visible when needed, fading away gently when you are concentrating on content. Tufte furiously neologizes, calling this “computer information debris.” Control junk is more apt, more terse, more Tuftian.

Direct manipulation: As Tufte says: information is the interface. Filtering and choosing should take place in the context of direct manipulation. A good essay on the possibilities of direct manipulation can be found here.

Fun: Above all, information can be fun and engaging to navigate. Tufte condemns Apple’s stock ticker for having “cartoony” and PowerPoint-like displays and offers an improved version (with 5 digits of precision). Apple’s cheery display offers a more entertaining, usable interface for day-to-day usage.

With our empathy for the day-to-day troubles of the business person seeking insight in data, it’s frustrating listening to Tufte. He is clearly an academic, with academic interests and academic timeframes. As much as his work is respected and inspirational within business circles, he makes little effort to enable his message to be implemented.

Good Tufte: Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design.

Bad Tufte: “…the conclusion of sparkline analysis in Beautiful Evidence, where the idea is to make our data graphics at least operate at the resolution of good typography (say 2400 dpi).”

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msgid=0002NC&topicid=1

*Ed: At least 2400 dpi? Orly?

Mostly right Tufte: “Thus the iPhone got it mostly right.”

Mostly wrong Tufte: “Adobe Illustrator is a big serious program that can do almost anything on the visual field (other than Photoshop an image). Most of my sparkline work was done in Illustrator. Fortunately all graphic designers and graphic design students have the program and know how to use it, so find a colleague who knows about graphic design.”

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msgid=0000Jr&topicid=1&topic=Ask%20E%2eT%2e

It is heartening to see Tufte engage and connect his mental frameworks to our modern, screen-oriented, graphics-accelerated, not graphics-designed world. But the future of information design and interaction belongs to the iPhone, not the printed page.

What do you do when you’d rather be out driving your BMW rather than sitting in your corner office? Make a business dashboard that looks like your car dashboard, of course. You’ll want to have lots of tachometers, temperature gauges, and traffic lights. It’s the ultimate business-driving machine.

It isn’t controversial to complain about the ineffectiveness of “gauges” for data visualization. In fact, even some of the worst offenders admit that gauges aren’t ideal:

Dr. Robert Alison of SAS in showing off a new easy graph procedure for creating gauges says:

“I know, I know … gauges have lots of drawbacks in dashboards. But hey, the other philosophy is ’give the customer what they want’ … and try to make it work as well as possible. So, as far as gauges go, these are pretty decent.”

Here’s the example he uses to show off “one of the sharper-looking dashboards I’ve seen”

The folks at Business Object’s Xcelcius admit that gauges shouldn’t always be used in their article entitled “The Use (and Misuse) of Gauges”.

That doesn’t stop them applying a triple-coat of carnauba wax while neglecting their rule to always label the endpoints.

In the end, they primly note: “Despite some recent bad press, a gauge isn’t inherently a poor graphic.” Bad press, is it. If only gauges had better PR.

In my opinion, warning about potential misuse isn’t firm enough. Gauges shouldn’t be used except under the most severe threats from a client offering enough money to buy absolution.

Stephen Few, a man who doesn’t mince words on information visualization, says:

“If you squint really hard, you can barely make out some of the values. But who cares, because if you’re an executive who likes to pretend that you’re driving a car while sitting at your desk rather than actually managing your business, then having a dashboard that is truly informative doesn’t really matter.”

Charley Kyd says:

“Using dashboard gauges for management reporting typically is a mistake. Gauges hide information that managers need and consume significant space in a report.”

Let’s break down the problems with gauges:

Gauges hide trends. For all the focus on how a value is performing, you’d think people would care about the historical trend.

Circles aren’t good for showing differences. Like pie charts, circular gauges aren’t the best way to show size or changes in values—bars are a more straightforward, if less sporty, approach.

Space eaters. Often gauges are used to show a single value. All that decoration for a single value must send Tufte into a tizzy. Attempts to cram two values into a gauge can be confusing. How do you read this one?

Difficult to read. The values can be obscured by all the attractive accoutrement:

Ranges can be tricky. By the analogy to a car dashboard, gauges are expected to have a static minimum and maximum value. What happens when a value goes beyond the pre-set range. Here’s an example of the “right way” from Xcelsius with the label: “This gauge shows a retail store’s progress against a daily revenue target.” We can only presume the maximum value is $45,000. What happens if I go beyond $45,000?

Traffic lights are contradictory. I may be getting nitpicky, but I can’t both have my traffic light look like the real thing (red on top, green on bottom) and abide by basic data visualization assumptions (better is higher).

Lastly, there are so many better options. Here’s a beautiful data display (courtesy of Mr. Few) that could have been done with gauges, but mercifully was not.

Misaligned goals, distorted behaviors, and a misguided sense of success… no, I’m not referring to college graduates. I’m talking about the problems caused by using the wrong metrics in your organization. You’ve probably seen examples like tracking average customer profitability and losing perspective on the variance in profitability or evaluating customer service reps on calls handled without regard for the quality of the experience. I’d like to offer up a quick-bake recipe for choosing the right metric.

Step 1: Set the context

Metrics generally serve one of two purposes. Start by understanding what you are trying to achieve.

1. Identifying problems. Defining the right metrics in this case requires you to do a little detective work: What is the data residue of a problem? What evidence can be found and how exactly does it show up?

2. Measuring performance. The right success metrics need to focus on measures that can be controlled and where improvement in the number is unabiguously a good thing.

Step 2: Balance the four dimensions of a good metric

Lots of metrics fail in at least one of these dimensions. A few examples:

• Common interpretation: We had a client who made a distinction between “leads” and “prospects” in their marketing organization. Prospects had theoretically expressed more interest in the service through their actions. Unfortunately the line between leads and prospects was always hard to decipher and the definitions were hard to communicate. On a related note, we got a kick out of Tom Davenport’s (author of “Competing on Analytics”) assertion that a company competing on analytics needs to “invent proprietary metrics for use in key business processes.” There is nothing inherently wrong with “invented proprietary metrics” but it sounds like something that is designed to confuse anyone outside of the inner sanctum.
• Actionable: Metrics are frequently too broad for the impact that a particular group can have. Customer satisfaction is a popular dashboard staple, but it is hard for most managers to see how they can have a significant impact on the number.
• Accessible, credible data: Sometimes the most valuable and obvious metrics are frustratingly hard to track. In the web analytics world, unique visitors is important to know, but user deletion of cookies has thrown a wrench into the works.
• Transparent, simple calculation: Top NFL agent Leigh Steinberg says of the famous quarterback ratings metric:”Other than one attorney in our office, I am unaware of a single human being who has the capacity to figure a quarterback rating.” I don’t know what kind of art majors he hires, but all they need to do is use the simplified formula: (83.33 * Comp %) + (4.16667 * Yds per att) + (333.333 * TD pct) – (416.667 * INT pct) + 25/12.

(Want a little validation of this framework? Avinash, respected web analytics guru, just published a post with “Four Attributes of Great Metrics” and he landed on a strikingly similar set of four: 1) instantly useful (i.e. actionable); 2) relevant (i.e. common interpretation); 3) timely (i.e. accessible); 4) uncomplex (i.e. transparent and simple).)

Step 3: Avoid the metrics bugaboos

Finally, here are a few traps that I’ve seen in deciding on appropriate metrics:

• Trending and distributions: Don’t always try to compress a metric into a single number. Often it is more revealing to show the metric across time or as a distribution to uncover variance.
• Edge cases: There will always edge cases where a metric may not mean what you think it means. These situations are worth understanding, but you shouldn’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
• Setting goals: Could you hold someone accountable for this metric without them throwing out a half-dozen reasons why it doesn’t make sense? It’s a decent test of the value of the metric.
• Self-serving: Be careful that you don’t select metrics simply because you know they’ll make you look good.

The design process is about whittling away distractions, making the obscure feel obvious, making the obvious feel implicit, and doing it without anyone noticing. To the untrained eye, your best work looks like you’ve done no work at all. If you’ve done a stellar job, then your design will feel utterly obvious. —Neil Mix from Paradox of Elegance blog post.

Neil goes on to say that “it’s easier to see the flaws than it is to see the elegance.” That may be true, but a careful look at the best interfaces reveals the little and beautiful elements that make all the difference. These small features might not determine whether someone uses a piece of software, but they will determine if the user enjoys their stay:

Designer Bret Victor, who we first wrote about here, has developed a desktop widget for the SF-area train schedules. He allows users to change their query right in the description of an object—notice the red text.

While we are fawning over Bret’s handiwork, here’s another cool feature he built into his Click-Shirt site for customized design of t-shirts. This bar at the bottom of the screen tracks the history of changes as the user designs a shirt. Each time I make an edit, I get a visual breadcrumb trail to easily see my history and backtrack.

Google Finance stock charts have a nifty little device that lets you change the time range you are looking at. You can change both the size and the start of the time window using one adjustable object. Not to mention the embedded alert markers.

Some elegant touches are more subtle. Check out the search toolbar in Firefox. When I start typing, it fills out search terms both from my history (above the line) and from common searches (below the line).

The Safari browser for Windows offers a new approach for finding words in a web page. The browser greys the screen and highlights the target word. And you can to tab through the various instances of the word with the orange highlighting.

And while we are on the subject of Apple: sometimes the difference between clunky and good is simply about the quality of the images. A while back I wrote a break-up letter to PowerPoint—one reason was that the Mac-alternative called Keynote does a much job with the look of default charts. The chart on the right feels more professional, in part due to the anti-aliasing of the image. (Joel on Software has an interesting post about anti-aliased fonts here.)

Finally an infographic from the New York Times called the Sector Snapshot. The beauty of this presentation of information is in the careful use of contrast and skill at keeping the focus on the numbers.

Everyone wants a dashboard and the promise of a world in which the intricacies of your business are clearly laid out on a single page. Dashboards can make running your business as easy as driving a car, where slight adjustments and careful attention to warnings mean smooth sailing on the road to success.

I’m not so convinced. For someone who is, check out the mysterious Dashboard Spy. He/she has a massive collection of dashboard screenshots and describes these precious morsels as “simple to understand and impressive to look at, these scorecards are becoming ’must-haves’ for all enterprises.”

If we already live in a dashboard-centric world, we might as well do them right. I see at least three areas where dashboards need improvement: depth, information display, and storytelling.

Depth. Stephen Few makes a worthwhile distinction between dashboards and something he calls “faceted analytical displays” (FADs):

• A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.
• A faceted analytical display is a set of interactive charts (primarily graphs and tables) that simultaneously reside on a single screen, each of which presents a somewhat different view of a common dataset, and is used to analyze that information.

We might consider dashboards a static version of FADs (or we could consider FADs a versatile dashboard). If that’s true (and I’m sure Stephen will step in to correct me), then who wants a plain dashboard? Why build something that only raises questions but doesn’t give the user any ability to drill down, explore, tweak parameters, or otherwise try to answer those questions?

Information display. Like most reporting, dashboards suffer from poor information design. Here’s our list of blogs that preach the right way and highlight the offenders. Here are two particularly misguided design approaches that I’ve seen recently…

Just because it is called a dashboard doesn’t mean you need to take the concept literally (via Dashboard Spy)

Just because you can make it shiny doesn’t mean you should. Crystal Xcelsius not only vigorously embraces pie charts, but they add a “reflective kidney bean” to further derail the information display.

Storytelling. Most dashboards are loose affiliations of charts—a hodgepodge of graphics on the same topic intended to offer a full view of a situation. It is the same problem so many people run into in creating href="http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2006/03/presentation-checklist-always-simplify-never-screenbean/">PowerPoint presentations.

You want the information to easily slide into the viewer’s brain and stick when it gets there. The best dashboards have story-like features such as:

• Set the stage. What is the context? Who are the characters?
• Focus on only the important elements and themes; don’t try to be a comprehensive account of everything that happened. Ruthlessly cut extraneous content.
• Offer recognizable characters to spare the reader’s precious attention. There is a high cost to asking readers to learn from scratch. For dashboards this means terms, metrics, graphics, and metaphors that are familiar within the organization.
• Create flow and cohesiveness from chapter to chapter. Themes and characters reappear chapter after chapter. A good dashboard isn’t a bunch of disjointed charts, but a logical flow from one analytical examination to the next.
• Levels of detail. Some elements of the story span the entire experience; other details provide the insights and seasoning to keep your interest.

Here’s a good example of a dashboard (perhaps FAD) from Visual I-O that has many of these storytelling elements.

In contrast, the following dashboards (courtesy of Dashboard Spy) don’t attempt to explain anything to the reader:

If you’ve seen a worse dashboard, sent it our way and we’ll put together a gallery of the worst of the worst. Please redact any company-specific information.

We all know at least one GUI Jock. That one guy who knows how to, say, run a complex query on the content management system, or export data from the annoying sales database front-end or actually get new data into what qualifies as “the system” where you work. He is a master of tools that appear obscure, but are in fact just a pain in the neck. He is not writing firmware for the space shuttle; he is changing the background gradients in your marketing dashboard.

The GUI Jock is a paradoxical figure. Indispensable and yet undervalued, he owes his livelihood to the ferocity of the beast he tames. The sheer number and complexity of pull-down menus, check-boxes, obscure options, software bugs, and poor user interface choices created by an external software vendor. The GUI Jock conquers them all—he is a human compiler who receives requests in the loose and informal language of the outsider and compiles them to the standards demanded by expensive enterprise software.

But how did he find himself in this position? Ironically, he may have fallen into this unfortunate role by being good at a few ad hoc requests which he likely completed under the assumption that he would soon be moving on to more interesting work. But now he is stuck in a trap that he helped build and of which others are afraid. He is there to fall on the grenade that is lousy software, poor documentation, and bad process so the rest of the organization can go about its job without another hassle. The GUI Jock suffers so we do not.

What can be done?

In my experience the GUI Jock is usually not happy with his lot. If you know him you are probably aware that he can be a grouch and he has probably sighed in your presence more than once (if you don’t know him, he might be you). But can we set him free?

A typical response is training. Grab a conference room for a few hours, set up a projector and show the junior staff just how to hold that chair while taming the beast known as the “InsiteDynaMetrix CollaboStream(tm)”. The juniors sit and nod, happy to have such a big block of their day accounted for. In my experience, the success rate of this approach is woefully low. It can backfire, basically serving to train attendees to know who exactly the GUI Jock is and that they should funnel all relevant requests directly to his inbox.

To protect itself, the organization demands that the GUI Jock stay in his role. He is the only person who will save himself. He has a few options:

• Sucker a new employee into the role. New employees are eager to please and crave the recognition of value that comes with being a GUI Jock. They are also too naive to see the quicksand.
• Increase the friction for people who lean on him. Ask for forms to be filled out, demand detailed requirements, and delay in delivering results. With enough process, these people may decide to serve themselves.
• Apply to graduate school.

prairieFyre Software, a provider of contact center solutions, has created a reporting tool that takes a table of data and encrypts it in chart form. The original numbers and trends are virtually unrecoverable. Congratulations, prairieFyre, for this exciting new approach. This may be patentable, but I’m afraid there is prior art.

Beat that, Junk Charts.

The folks at Trixie Tracker very nearly read my mind. They created an online service that helps you keep track of the daily patterns of your infant. Users enter information about nap times, feedings, and diaper activity—then have access to a variety of informative charts and graphs. “Learn more about your baby’s needs and behavior… get more sleep,” they promise. Here’s an example of their “sleep telemetry” graphic:

The idea is good…but it doesn’t cover our most pressing need as parents. Like a business, we need real-time information that will help us make game-time decisions. Is he ready for a nap? What’s going on in that diaper? Does he need to eat now? These are the answers we need to ensure a contented baby.

With these concerns in mind, I took baby analytics a step further: I developed a real-time baby dashboard with heads-up display. Using the Trixie Tracker log data as a starting point, I added a durable in-diaper sensor to capture the, err, “raw data” necessary for timely action. The final step was to attach a wearable DLP, high-lumen (indoor, outdoor usage) projection lens to baby’s outfit. Now I’m always one step ahead of an unhappy kid.

(Click for larger image)