Updating Boring Reports
Making reports Fun
Reports and fun are normally two words not used in the same sentence. I for one have never heard them being uttered together. I want show you an example of how data can be made easy and fun to look at using simple infographic techniques.
Reports are vital to any business and range and range in complexity from several statistics to thousands in the one report. I argue what benefits do these reports deliver. Do your report’s viewers gain any insights from looking at rows of data, pie, bar and line charts? The example I’m creating today is taking a telephony report in this case an “Agent Group Business Results Report” generated by a well known tool and simplifying it.
Let me be clear though not all reports can be simplified in this way. It’s up to you, to analyse the customers requirements and then present that information in the best way possible.
What is Infographics
Infographics or information design is simply about presenting complex information and data in a simple and easy to understand way. There are a range of apps and tools out there that can assist you in the generating of reports these days. A quick search will return thousands of results.
The example Agent Report current view
and the standard visualization for this data is:
Taking this report and reducing the complexity.
As you can see above I’v taken the most important information and presented it back in three different ways. The underlying data is still present but not being presented.
Area Graph — The graph is probably the most easily recognized of the visualizations. It’s strength is in giving the specifics on volume and date in one view. Having multiple data sets easily comparable. It’s weakness is it does work for data that is not continuous.
Pictograph — The pictograph is a great way to present data in an easy to ready manner. It’s strength is in its ability to take large sets of data and simplifying them into one image. It’s weakness is does not contain detail (can over simplify) and depending on the type of image used can look messy.
Word Cloud — The word cloud or Date Cloud in this case has similar advantages to the pictograph however adds the specificity of date were the pictograph is even more simpler. It’s weakness is in the lack of detail additional to data and size the importance of the data is not stated.
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