Choose Your Own Adventure

posted by: Nick Roman on 2/8/2010

When thinking about how to increase business-wide adoption of online reporting tools, there are many factors that can make a difference in increasing usage to a diverse audience. Addressing aspects such as the clarity of actionable information, creating a user experience appropriate for the capabilities of the specific audience, and engaging users to explore the data further are just a few areas that spring to mind. 

However, many reports simply transfer the report content used in “offline” report documents and treat an online report as just a series of pages in a book.  There is little consideration of the notion that online and offline formats offer different strengths for presentation of results, and to blindly try to replicate a document in “Internet form” dilutes the potential of the available capabilities when delivering insight online.

Commonplace concepts used in any engaging Internet experience such as user interaction (filtering data, drilling down, and other controls on changing table / chart content) and personalization of content for different audiences play to the strengths to an online delivery method and ultimately provide a smarter way to present a wealth of data without being too intimidating for users who just need to know the headline results.

If an online report was to resemble any book, it should be more like the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books I found fascinating in my geekier (and low-tech) youth; in which YOU are the hero and you get to follow the story (or in this case insights) of your choosing.  Doesn’t that sound like a more engaging experience already?