Every employee within an organization requires information to do their job effectively. So, when considering the types of users for a Business Intelligence deployment, everyone must be considered. This includes the business analysts, power users, casual users, management, and the executive suite. This wide span of users also covers all departments within an organization (e.g., Human Resources, Operations, Marketing, Legal, IT). It should also be considered that the role for each of your users can fluctuate as they perform their day-to-day jobs – especially within smaller or more flexible organizations. John Brookmyre presents this very well in his post from December of 2008. The key point from John’s post that really interested me was this: “…BI interfaces could be improved if we designed them with the aim to empower users to move freely and use all of the functionality available”. This is one of the critical issues regarding how Business Intelligence vendors can make our products more pervasive. Our users are intelligent. They understand the data of their business and most of them are naturally curious to follow an insight to its conclusion. In order for BI vendors to help organizations make BI more ubiquitous, which would allow insights to be made and stories to be told by all users, our products and workflows need to be simpler and we need to provide interoperability. In addition, we should expose functionality only when it is necessary. This means presenting the novice user with basic functionality and gradually exposing more functionality.
Simplicity
Simple, but functional is key to any software interface. When thinking about the design of Business Intelligence software, it is important to consider the business scenarios in which the software will be used. Ultimately, BI software will be used in an effort to ease decision making. As such, if we can make the interface simpler for the end user and content creator, then we can make the decision making process faster. For example, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer allows end users and analysts to perform Google-like keyword searches for data. This data is then returned in an iTunes-like interface. Users can then take the data that they find interesting and analyze it within the Explorer interface. This is a simple tool that does not get in the way of the business process. QlikView takes a great step towards simplicity by allowing a user to download a full copy of their product within minutes. This, combined with the ability to quickly create content within QlikView via immediately available demos, makes it easier for BI software to proliferate. Tableau takes this one step further by allowing a user to download their professional edition without even registering. How does this make the decision making process easier? The software is easier to install, easier to learn, and provides a quicker means to analyzing information.
Interoperability
Allowing the products within our suite to interoperate is also important to the proliferation of BI. Currently the more established BI vendors have products that fit specific purposes: report writers for corporate reporting, dashboard builders for consolidating information views, analysis tools for slicing and drilling into information, and the list goes on… Allowing content to be transferred throughout these tools not only makes it easier for the user to take advantage of the features of the entire product suite, but also allows more users to put together a story from the information they are viewing. For example, if I were to build a document within SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, I am pretty much stuck in that format – unless I want to rewrite the report again in a different product. I should be able to perform my query and analysis in Web Intelligence, push part of the information out to Crystal Reports as static content, and then push other parts of the document out to Xcelsius to start building a consolidated visualization to tell a story. The content created within each product in a BI suite should be portable and easy to push into other products.
QlikView has taken an interesting approach to this problem by creating a single content type. For a new vendor in the BI market, this is a great step towards presenting themselves as easy to adopt and easy to use. There is no struggle to determine which content type is best for a particular need and no need to give users access to multiple tools. It is all the same tool.
Gradual Release of Functionality
Also important to the pervasiveness of BI is how we expose functionality within the product. Imagine if you were to open up a product that you had never used before and were presented with all of these cryptic menu items and buttons. How quickly would you move on to find another product that looks easier to use? A BI product that is meant to be used by all within an organization should present its basic functionality within the immediate user interface and allow more advanced functionality to be discovered. For example, when you open Excel, you can immediately see the purpose of the menus related to specific high-level functionality: insert, page layout, formulas, data, review, and view. It is clear from these labels what I will find as sub-menu items.
In addition, the buttons with which the user is immediately presented are pretty clear. For example, the font, alignment, and number formatting controls are intuitive. As another example, we can consider SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence Rich Client. When you open this tool, the first thing you are presented with is a menu allowing you to choose to create a new document or open an existing document.
If I choose to create a new document, then I’m ready to start within two additional clicks. If I chose to create a new document against an SAP BusinessObjects Universe, then I am presented with an interface that allows me to drag objects exposed within the Universe into my query in order to create my document.
This interface is fairly intuitive and the text helps the user figure out what to do next. There are some elements that are unclear. The text at the bottom that states “Display by objects” really means nothing to a user that has no understanding of what an object is. I like that the “Scope of Analysis” section of the interface is not displayed by default. This should be considered an advanced type of functionality that the user can expose once they understand what it does.
QlikView also provides a fairly intuitive interface. The first screen with which a user is presented is a highly intuitive set of examples and demos.
Also, the high-level menus are easy to understand – with the exception of “Selections”, “Bookmarks”, and “Object”. The buttons presented are similar enough to Microsoft Office that any user should be able to figure them out quickly.
QlikView does a great job of allowing their users to immediately build content by making the interface easy to follow and presenting embedded demos.
Tableau is another great example of gradually exposing functionality. The first page within the Tableau interface presents with the options of opening existing data sources, connecting to a new data source, viewing samples, or viewing training videos.
After opening one of the sample data sources (Coffee Chain), the user is presented with a fairly intuitive interface for creating an information view (in this case, a report). I can quickly create a report by dragging a dimension (e.g., Product Type) into the “Columns” section and a measure (e.g., Sales) into the “Rows” section. While building the report I get an immediate visualization and the application even detects the best chart for displaying my information.
Not only is it simple to build a report for a novice user, it is also easy to add filters and change the properties of the report. It is quite simple to change their suggested information view into another format by using the “Show Me!” button at the top and selecting a different visualization type. This is made even easier by the fact that the application hides visualizations which are not relevant to the data being viewed (notice the greyed out visualizations).
As can be seen from the examples above, each of these products makes it simpler to get started with information viewing and analysis, but only exposing a basic level of functionality at within the immediate interface. The more complex functionality is accessed within sub-menus or via right-clicks. Over time users will become more experience with the products and will start to investigate other functionality via exploration or reading documentation.
So, what’s the point?
The objective of this post was to higlight specific examples of simplicity, interoperability, and a tiered exposure of functionality. The end goal of building our BI interfaces with these ideas in mind is to allow more users to take advantage of the software without being overwhelmed and without having to ask for help. In the end, this will allow BI to become more pervasive and will enable more stories to be told based on the data within an orgnization. This will allow those organizations to really see what their data is telling them so that they can improve their processes and become more efficient at doing what they do best.
