Videos on designing reports!

As I am working on changing how our reporting systems work and look, these series of report design videos by Leila Gharani popped up just in time to give me ideas. The videos show how you can think through changing from a page full of texts and tables to something more engaging and with clear graphics that tell your story. Now I am probably going to try to be a little more artsy/designer (like adding white space to ease the flow of the eye around the page or screen) in my approach but I can use her ideas as an approach.

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Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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My first thought was I have to create something that will help the managers in their work; not just create something pretty. It has to be something that guides the managers in their day to day work. At this point in time I’ve come up with 3 concepts:

1. Show single numbers in context such as how it changes over time or in comparison to your competitors (or competitive products). So, saying someone weighs 100 pounds is meaningless you add in that that someone is 4 years old or 10 years old or 98 years old.
2. Sometimes your customers need that table of numbers due to the nature of the business. Maybe try to break up that table into “categories” such as products whose price changed over “x” dollars throughout the current year, products that changed between 0 and “x” dollars, and products that had no price change.
3. Maybe connect one set of numbers to another set of metrics to see if metrics one is impacting metrics two. As an example, say you spend advertising dollars throughout the year and you know when those ad dollars are spent, then you can measure the visits throughout time and the sales throughout time to see if there is a relationship, rather than just measure visits.

Those are my tentative concepts that I have right now, but I am basically trying to break what we’ve been doing and make those numbers signal something and that’s hard to do that when it is just a single number reported like we’ve been doing.