The session materials that were used (including charting files) can be downloaded here: http://anvildataworks.com/blog/?p=296
Let's discuss & demo the current state of charting and dashboarding with FileMaker. Have your clients/customers started asking more frequently for dashboards and performance charts? Big BI (business intelligence) vendors have hyped 'dashboard dazzle' for 10+ years... raising marketplace expectations. How does this affect solution design for our smaller clients?
Sure, graphs & gauges are cool... but experts concur that most are poor at conveying truly useful info. So how do we best give users/sponsors/clients what they want (and what they need) while keeping dev costs down? This topic can cover technologies and implementations, design theory for human perception, and real-world strategies for producing value and benefit.
To jump-start the conversation, we will offer some of the following content from the co-hosts' courses ('Ace of Charts' and 'Dashing Dashboards' from SavvyData, and 'Information Dashboards' from Anvil Dataworks):
Three Approaches to Charting in FileMaker
Three different methods for constructing charts in FileMaker, to provide deployment options appropriate for any organization. We will briefly demo some of the latest charting techiques using
- Plug-ins and container fields
- HTML/Flash in a Web Viewer
- FileMaker-native primitives (calculations, repeating fields, conditional formatting)
Building Dashboards
- What are the technical and business processes you’ll need to follow to implement visual dashboards, scorecards, and other decision support systems that monitor selected key performance indicators (KPIs)
- How to design effective information display and user interaction capabilities appropriate for your audience, by applying the best information design for the “three threes”—a convenient memory hook representing the distinctions between systems that:
• 1) monitor, 2) analyze or 3) manage performance metrics, for
• 1) operations, 2) tactical or 3) strategic purposes, using
• 1) transactional, 2) multidimensional or 3) graphical data layers.
- How to Work with Clients to Define Performance Metrics
Other Topics
• Your Current Environment: assessing factors for success
• Dashboard Design Dogma: Simplicity, Usability, Efficacy, Interactivity
• Information Architecture Insight: how people perceive
• Focus on the Data: clean, normalized, usable, reliable
• Focus on the User: the right information in the right style to the right person
• Focus on the Purpose: serving the big picture by making sure the pieces fit
• Development Methods: tools, techniques, and templates
• Deployment Realities: caveats and provisos to anticipate
• Completion: tips to aid deployment, transition, and closure
Cohost: Lee Lukehart of SavvyData
Cohost: Chuck Melton of Anvil Dataworks
Comments (6)
Lee Lukehart said
at 7:02 pm on Jan 6, 2010
Thanks for the book reco, Chuck! I, too, am a fan of TDWI's Eckerson. "Performance Dashboards" is one of the 9 reference books I list in the Datavis Resources section of SavvyData.com. Do you like the Maani better than FusionCharts? For the latter, Ben Goldstein at SWConsulting.com has done a stellar job revealing their API in FMP. His is more thorough than mine which is targeted more towards training on the concepts. Anyway, I think your discussion sequence on design theory sounds spot-on. Can we get together back-channel and compare notes? Perhaps you would like to co-host this session with me? Thanks for commenting!
Lee Lukehart said
at 6:45 pm on Jan 6, 2010
Thanks for weighing in, David. I know the issues of which you speak... MY main concerns are the same: 1) how long it will take to change archaic perceptions of what is now possible with the FileMaker UI? Until FileMaker dashboards become more commonplace (and are made more highly visible), prospects may well go to other platforms not knowing what we can do. As for your second point, I think we'll start seeing a lot of dashboard demos this coming year that will lighten our pre-sales workload for this feature. (To help the cause, I intend to build out & polish a few dashboard demos for different industries using complex sets of public-domain data -- which I'll share with the FM community.)
Chuck Melton said
at 5:28 pm on Jan 6, 2010
Read "Performance Dashboards" by Wayne Eckerson?
Based on my experience in teaching fairly in depth Dashboard work shops for FM Developers, I think focusing on the design theory is the best way to go in the amount of time you have. I would focus on identifying the best metrics, using an appropriate element to display them, and touch on some of the niftier schema tricks for aggregating and grouping data.
Also, I have some good basic examples for using the Maani chart API that I give out to people.
David Wikström said
at 5:19 pm on Jan 6, 2010
My vote would go to 3, with half a vote for 2 as well.
Not sure I'll be able to come myself, but I would personally be more interested in the dashboard side of things. Charts are great, and would merit a session on their own, but still feels like "old news."
My main problem is that very few clients ask me to do dashboards or similar things - most are long-time FileMaker user who are used to a standard kind of interface, and thus miss out on the benefits of the kinds of interfaces that now are becoming increasingly more simple to build. So how do you demo the possibilities in a way that can make sense to clients with extremely varying needs - without spending 10 hours per client on a demo you may never get paid for?
Lee Lukehart said
at 12:24 pm on Jan 6, 2010
Or perhaps we should delve deeply into the schema modifications required to efficiently incorporate charting & dashboards?
Lee Lukehart said
at 12:07 pm on Jan 6, 2010
Hey everyone (who's interested in this topic/session): Would you rather it be more about 1) the techniques & aesthetics of charting, or 2) assembling dashboards, or 3) how to improve requirements discovery for charts & dashboards? Thanks in advance for the comments! --Lee
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