Making BI tools more usable, given at the February 2008 TDWI Executive Summit in Las Vegas. This is a short conceptual talk about what usability and experience are like on the web and with consumer technologies as contrasted with what users see when a BI tool is dropped in front of them. Quite a contrast. Let's push our vendors for usability improvements instead of bogging us down with more features that won't be used or yet another chart type.

1. Making BI More Usable
Have some empathy for non-technical users
Mark Madsen – Feb. 18, 2008
www.ThirdNature.net
Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/

2. What Do Most BI Users Want?
Not the best of everything, just tools
that are not:
• Hard to learn
• Difficult to use
• Time consuming
• Frustrating
They want what they use at work to be
like what they use at home:
• Intuitive
• Simple
• Immediate
• Personal
This is innovation from the outer edges, the
consumerization of BI.
Slide 2
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

3. “When technology
delivers basic needs,
user experience
dominates”
Don Norman

4. What’s the user experience here?
Slide 4
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

5. “Better experiences, not more features.”
Roland Rust

6. Example: Web 2.0 and Mashups
What’s wrong with the
City of Oakland
CrimeWatch web site?
Figuring out what to do
Doing it once you figure
it out
Navigation
Control
Display
Exceptions
These are classic BI problems, and you can almost
recognize a familiar BI interface process here
[demo]
Slide 6
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

7. Example: Web 2.0 and Mashups
Oakland Crimespotting
is an example of a web
site (City of Oakland
police CrimeWatch)
re-imagined using
better information
design practices.
[demo]
One non-obvious comment: mashups often remove
features and user choice
Slide 7
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

8. A Common BI Problem: The Invisible Crowd

9. Fixing Things A Little Bit
Slide 9
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

10. What’s the Most Common BI Activity?
Slide 10
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

11. How Does BI Address Findability?
Taxonomies
aka
Categories
implemented as
Folders
Slide 11
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

12. What’s the BI User’s Experience?
Slide 12
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

13. How do web
sites address
findability?
Where are
my report
folders?
Slide 13
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

14. How Can Search Be Used In BI?
• Search within a BI tool to find:
• reports, charts, queries, dashboards
• Search within a BI tool to generate an
ad-hoc query from the underlying
metadata
• Search across multiple BI instances or
different BI tools
• Search across both BI and traditional
documents indexed via search engines
• But that’s just searching. Building on
top of search…
• Tags and search
• Incorporate user ratings for relevancy
• Recommendations for reports, e.g. people
who ran X also ran Y
Slide 14
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

15. Example: Search Within BI
Short demo of one BI search implementation: Progress EasyAsk
Slide 15
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

16. How Can We Benefit From Better Usability?
• Self service
• Discovery
• Adoption
Slide 16
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

17. CC Image Attributions
Thanks to the people who supplied the creative commons licensed images used in this presentation:
• motionless in crowd2.jpg - http://flickr.com/photos/laburbuja/149566116/
• man does something about his future - http://flickr.com/photos/eklektikos/77801351
• teapot.jpg - http://flickr.com/photos/joi/411403/
Slide 17
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen

18. Creative Commons
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United
States License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ or send
a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor,
San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
Slide 18
Third Nature, January 2008 Mark Madsen