MicroStrategy ONE
Planning the Report Services (RS) dashboard's outline and structure
Best practices for the outline and structure of a Report Services (RS) dashboard include:
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Use Microsoft Excel, Paint, PowerPoint, or another tool to create a mock-up of the Report Services (RS) dashboard. The mock-up should convey a clear vision of the information, structure, layout, and formatting. Send the mock-up to your user community to gather feedback on its usefulness. This can save time creating and formatting a complex, finished RS dashboard that may need to be redone.
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Group related reports so they can be placed in a small panel stack, each panel displaying a single report. As users flip through the panels, they will be flipping through the related reports. The reports in a panel stack should not be reports that a user might want to see side by side in an RS dashboard; rather, the reports should show different levels of detail about the same or closely related data.
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Plan to provide visualizations. These can include any of the available widgets, such as a gauge, thermometer, heat map, and so on, which can help users understand data at a glance. Consider the following best practice:
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Do not add so many graphical objects that the focus of the RS dashboard is no longer the data. Too many visualizations can detract from the importance of the data.
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Plan to provide interactivity. This can include any of the available selectors, such as tabs, buttons, and sliders, which let users change a report's metrics, attribute elements, and filters. Interactive features let users customize the display of data without needing a developer or designer to perform any work.
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Consider common user workflows when designing an RS dashboard. Think about how analysts are going to move through the RS dashboard, what links they will want to click, and so on. Try to embed this workflow directly into the RS dashboard. Do this by placing objects so that data can be interpreted from the top left to the bottom right.
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Granularity should increase from top to bottom on an RS dashboard. For example, place objects that display key performance indicators at the top of the RS dashboard. These objects might include large graphs such as a funnel graph (also called a pipeline), a Pie chart, widgets such as a gauge, and so on.
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Allow users to drill within the RS dashboard to determine the level of detail that they need to display. Use pre-defined drill paths to direct the users' analysis. Drilling can provide more details and more information without interrupting the workflow. Use links to other RS dashboards, documents, or prompted reports to provide the drilling paths.
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Decide which objects on the RS dashboard should share the same formatting styles, and which objects should be physically aligned with each other. These decisions are important time-savers if you make them before you spend a lot of time actually formatting objects and fine-tuning object placement.
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Use effects for trends, summaries, and other high-level data. If users want to analyze details in a report, too many effects can make it difficult to understand more detailed data.
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For example, if you apply the curved effect to the line in a line graph, the exact points where the line hits the graph are adjusted so that the line can be curved smoothly. This looks nice, but users who rely on seeing every detail will have difficulty. If you want to apply the curved effect, you can also provide a grid report alongside showing exact values. An alternative is adding tooltips (a mouseover) which display actual values for points on the graph.