When making analogies, think digital
The KPIs that managers need to drive their business are nothing more than numbers. Speed is measured in numbers, too. That’s why professional pilots only use digital (and not analog) speedometers.
According to Webster, an analogy is a resemblance, a similarity or a comparison thereof. We can always learn something new from analogies. Recently, for example, I questioned if efficiency through automation applies for industrial production, why can’t it hold true for reporting?
Drivers, pilots, astronauts, train engineers and managers all rely on instrumentation to explain the current operations of the car, jet, space shuttle, train or company through the displayed values. Due to these similarities, we are inclined to transfer these experiences into other areas. We must do so, however, with caution. The conditions are rarely so similar that we can do a one-to-one translation.
The cockpit of a Cup Porsche. Please click to enlarge.
Speaking of cars, the only truly worthy paradigm is racing. The teams work under extreme deadlines and regularly need to make costly, high-risk investments. The slightest mistake can have tragic consequences and there is no room allotted for correction. From an economic standpoint, we might say that only in such an extreme environment an ideal system could mature. That applies for help systems, too, like the instrumentation in a race car.
Now … what stands out the most in the picture above?
Speed is displayed digitally. No scale. No indicator. Why? A pilot has less than a tenth of a second to benchmark the speed when breaking as well as entering or leaving the curve. And every single km/h counts. Any type of graphical encryption would make the number more difficult to read.
Speedometers in normal cars are analog because it’s still the trend and the law limits the speed in which we enter a curve on busy city streets or highways. Trends are also to blame why many management reports still contain analog gauges. Unfortunately, in this case the software vendors misunderstood the analogy. After all, what manager would want to encrypt his or her company’s KPIs which, in effect, are nothing more than numbers?
In a competitive world, digital gauges are the only way to go. Who knows? They may come in fashion one day. If they do, however, it will probably be for the wrong reasons.
I disagree that digital is always better, analogue displays for reports have their place, and that is to do with comparisons between numbers.
Monday, May 19th, 2008, 12:13 pmThe human eye and brain can very easily assimilate several visual inputs and choose between them on a variety of criteria – the largest bar on a chart, the darkest colour, the smallest pie-slice and so on. Evolution has tuned us to select the biggest juiciest ripest-looking fruit, so our built-in pathways for doing this kind of evaluation is very well honed.
The race car driver only needs to know his speed right now. If it was useful to compare to the speed at the same point on the last lap, or to his competitor’s speed or an average or some other factor, an analogue display of some kind would probably be more useful.
At a _very quick_ glance, which of these numbers is largest:
34, 59, 28, 71, 46 ?
If you ‘heard’ the numbers as words and thought about their meaning (a fairly normal process called reading) this takes too long.
A simple visual representation such as a bar chart would make the relationship between these figures clearer and the largest would jump out without even thinking about it.
Dashboards (in the BI sense) should provide this kind of clear, unambiguous information with the least effort on the part of the reader. Actual detailed specific numbers are important, but in most business analysis the trends, comparisons and relationships between values is just as critical.
In the example the author provides (the speedometer in the racing car), he fails to recognize that the most important piece of data a driver needs is not his speed, but his engine RPMs. And guess what … look at the dashboard and notice that RPMs are represented in an analog fashion!
Adam V. is right … many usuabilty studies support this.
Thursday, September 4th, 2008, 11:50 pm