Organizations have a personality, and it bleeds into everything from executive reporting to product offerings. A recent Fortune article entitled Microsoft without Gates offers this wonderful tidbit about Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft:

Even though he never was a serious computer programmer, by all accounts Ballmer is just as good at math as Gates is. He lives and breathes data. “Steve has a computer in his head,” says Bob Muglia, a 20-year company man who heads the Server and Tools division. Ballmer expects his subordinates to be adept in math as well. He distributes 11-by-17 sheets filled with numbers detailing the progress of various operations. The numerals are so small that executives use transparent magnifier rulers to see them. But there are never any columns showing percentage changes. Ballmer believes people ought to do that in their heads. It saves space on the paper for more numbers.

Wow. If it is as bad as the author describes, Ballmer has designed the anti-dashboard.

The Presentation Zen blog offers another great example of organization culture as displayed in business artifacts.

Gates here explaining the Live strategy. A lot of images and a lot of text...Good graphic design guides the viewer and has a clear hierarchy or order so that she knows where to look first, second, and so on. What is the communication priority of this visual? It must be the circle of clip art, but that does not help me much.

Does it get more "Zen" than this? "Visual-Zen Master," Steve Jobs, allows the screen to fade completely empty at appropriate, short moments while he tells his story.

Straight from the parallel universe where clever and horrible go together like peanut butter and chocolate comes the following press release:

We are excited to announce the launch of our new community website for Sears and Kmart customers. The service you originally registered with, My SHC Community is now called sk-YOU. The new name represents "Sears and Kmart, building a better relationship with you" and that is of course, part of our vision and mission. It is a growing and personalized online community currently comprised of 40,000 consumers who want to be heard. You can share ideas, opinions and thoughts on a wide variety of topics from travel to kitchen appliances and cell phone service. It enables you to provide feedback and guidance on the offers and shopping experiences that are most important to you.

I can see how this sounded wildly clever in a meeting.

Mash Sears, Kmart, and "you" all together and look what you get. It shows our commitment to the customer and it sounds like "sku".

Bzzzt, horrible. People don't care about stock keeping units—and they certainly don't want to be associated with one. They don't care about clever. Unless you're a financier, there's no reason to associate Sears with Kmart. Branding should help the you understand and remember a product. It's not about how you perceive the customer or about how you perceive an internal initiative. The dash and all caps YOU makes it harder for the customer to remember. But I ramble.

At Juice, our naming bible is available in PDF form from Igor International.

http://www.igorinternational.com/process/naming-guide-product-company-names.php

The central wisdom of this guide—and it's packed full of gems, naming taxonomies by industry, checklists, taglines, case studies—is that names fall into the following categories.

Descriptive names (names that describe what the product or company does) BMW, IBM, AdWords

• Good for a product, easy to remember
• Rough sledding for a company name, as there will be dozens of companies in the field with similar names (unless you have 100 years of meticulous branding like BMW and IBM)

Invented names with latin roots

• Aquilent, Taligent, Acela, Agilent
• "Safe" choices, hard to remember, a blank slate. Generally too clever by half. Hey, did you think it was clever to name a company as a cross between "agile" and "intelligent"? Nobody cares!

Invented names that are fun to say

• Snapple, Oreo, Kodak
• Fun to say, opens the door for lots of positive associations with strong branding

Experiential names (names that describe the experience of the company or product)

• Navigator, Safari, TrailBlazer, Fidelity
• Intuitive but common, doesn't differentiate, a workmanlike approach for a product

Evocative names (names that evoke feelings about the experience you will have with the company—those feelings may even be initially negative)

• Caterpillar, Apple, Amazon, AirPort, Target, Yahoo, Virgin
• Connects emotionally with people because they have lots of previous experience with the word. "Scary" choices that are hard to get a committee to agree to

We often are are asked why we're named "Juice"—Igor is the answer. When we go places, people say "Heeey, Juice guys!"—if you're a client, be aware you're not the first one to use that line. We benefit from every dollar Nantucket Nectars spends on their "Juice Guys" ads and we love it. Every dollar Tropicana spends helps you remember our name. Even OJ Simpson is on our branding team.

If you're naming an internal product, steer toward descriptive names or evocative names. If you're creating a reporting portal, don't be afraid to call it "Report Portal". Or call it "Butterfly" or "Moonbeam." Brighten people's lives by delivering fun, or ease their lives by not making them remember some obscure acronym. Most of all, remember to be a servant of your customers and that clever is not equal to smart.

A couple months ago, we put together a Greasemonkey tool that sucked data out of Google Analytics, and after mining it for trend information, integrated it back into the GA interface. This week's tool combines and extends Google Analytics with data from an outside source.

Here is a quick alpha of our Greasemonkey integration of external data reporting into Google Analytics for Kampyle, a "feedback analytics service." Click on the images to zoom in.

Clicking on the 'Kampylize' tab queries the Kampyle site in real-time to populate the standard GA data table.

Our friends at Kampyle run a service that allows website owners to put a feedback button on individual pages of their website. All information submitted by the user is uploaded to a central Kampyle database that compiles the user feedback with web page url and standard internet statistics such as the name of the browser. Website owners can access a server-end service that consists of a reporting site complete with summary data tables, graphs, and charts.

Since both sites are web-based reporting suites segmented in a similar fashion (individual website, date, web browser, etc.), they integrate together naturally. There is a lot of value in placing related data side by side, allowing users to get a more holistic picture of web site performance. If you have other ideas of data sources that would fit neatly with Google Analytics, let us know and we'll consider building the integration.

If you're interested in technical details, continue to Open Juice to see how this is all accomplished...

We frequently get requests to review and write about analytics-related solutions. I’ve put off most of these requests because it sounded like a lot of work. Then I had an 4-hour-work-week-style epiphany: most new users only give a new product or service a few minutes before they make up their mind. Why can’t I make the same snap judgement and call it an expert opinion?

First up is Open Flash Charts, pointed out to us by Matt Bear. This is an open source project started by John Glazebrook to provide flash charts that can be embedded in web pages. I love John’s explanation for taking on this project:

“Once upon a time I had to deal with a company who sell flash charting components, their component had a bug that I needed fixing, so I emailed them about it asking when it’d be fixed. (Remember that I had paid real money for this software.) They were so incompetent, rude and obnoxious that after three or four weeks of emails I thought to myself “I could learn Flash and Actionscript and write my own charting component, release it as Open Source, host it on sourceforge and build up a community of helpful coders faster than they can fix a single bug.” And that is what I did. And that is why it is free. I guess the moral of the lesson is: don’t piss off your customers.”

Great lesson. Great attitude. There are a bunch of vendors in this space (Fusion Charts, AnyChart, ILOG, PHP/SWF Charts, amCharts, Corda) and the going price seems to start at $500 for a developer's license up to $5,000 for an enterprise license. (Apparently that doesn’t always come with customer service.)

Open Flash Charts isn’t as flashy as any of these products, but that tends to be a good thing for charting components. Here’s a column chart from Fusion charts (notice how each bar is a separate color, for no good reason)

Here’s the Open Flash Charts

Open Flash Charts does a number of things well:

• It seems to be easy to implement. Basically, you just copy the Open Flash Chart SWF file into your web server, then start embedding flash charts into your HTML and point to either static or dynamic data on your server.
• You can configure data labels, background, number formats, on-click events, tooltips, etc.
• All the basic chart types are available (bar, line, area, pie, scatter).
• The help forum seem both lively (multiple messages a day) and supportive (a generally polite tone with lots of code posted).

On the negative side, Open Flash Charts doesn’t totally succeed in terms of data visualization fundamentals. The default charts have some contrast issues, odd color choices, and a little excess chartjunk. And when the charts get some “pizzazz,” things get worse:

I know… it is an open source project, so I should step up and fix the things I don’t like. I would, but I just ran out of my 10 minutes.

There is a tendency with reporting, and dashboards in particular, to cram as much information on the page as possible. It is a problem that Avinash describes with typical candor:

“This one of the core reasons why most dashboards are 'crappy', i.e. they are data pukes that provide little in terms of context and even less in terms of actionable value.”

In the past, we have offered tools to make data presentation as clear as possible (chart chooser, Excel chart cleaner). Sometimes clean isn’t enough; a more dramatic approach is needed.

One alternative is to shift the focus from the full data to changes in the most critical data points. By pulling out the important exceptions, you can make it easier for your audience to digest what matters and take action.

Stephen Few says in his book Information Dashboard Design:

“The best way to condense a broad spectrum of information to fit onto a dashboard is in the form of summaries and exceptions…given the purpose of a dashboard to help people monitor what’s going on, much of the information it presents is necessary only when something unusual is happening; something that falls outside the realm of normality, into the realm of problems and opportunities. Why make someone wade through hundreds of values when only one or two require attention? We call these critical values exceptions.”

Alerts are one mechanism to turn the focus to the exceptions, outliers and data highlights. Whether embedded in the dashboard or presented separately, alerts can be the extra layer of abstraction that make a dashboard useful. Unfortunately, they are hard to get right. I’ve arrived at four C’s for effective alerts—context, cogency, communication, control. Here’s a checklist to consider as you build alerts into a dashboard or report:

Context: Users need to understand how an alert is defined and how it fits into the larger picture.

• Are the parameters well defined? An alert is commonly defined by the following factors: metric (e.g. revenue), dimension (e.g. time), delta (e.g month over month change), scope (e.g. Northeast region, Peanut-product line), threshold (e.g. increase or decrease of 10%).
• Is the timing of the alerts actionable? One client explained to us that fluctuations in many of their metrics make monthly alerts too frequent—it would unnecessarily alarm people when, from their perspective, no significant trend had been established.
• Is the change statistically significant? This is of particular importance when you are measuring deltas. A doubling of traffic from a referring site doesn’t mean much when it is moving from one to two visitors.

Cogency: An alerting system needs to avoid causing unnecessary alarm while delivering easy-to-understand information that can be acted upon.

• Can the alerts be described in simple terms that even an executive can understand? Alerts should have a real-world meaning that users are familiar with. If an alert is based on a complex metric, for example, users will be confused as to the implications.
• Is the alert actionable? In the best cases, alerts should point users to both the drivers of the alert and the actions that can address the situation. This system does neither: ![terror warning system]
• Are the alerts so granular and/or frequently triggered that users will get alert fatigue? Excessive use of alerts will undermining their credibility. We saw this happen at one client where an IT-designed system threw off alerts like they were going out of style. The application went out of style the next year when users decided it was more distracting than useful. Here’s another example of a system that seems designed to raise blood pressure.

(It appears that a 5% increase in brand attribute performance isn’t good enough to get you out of the yellow.)

Communication: Alerts must be designed to effectively capture attention and inform.

• Is the alert placed in context? Google Finance does a nice job of putting news alerts within the stock chart.
• Is it clear what the user should do next? Give the user a clear path to more information so they can understand the full context of the alert.
• Does the sophistication of your alerts match the sophistication of your audience? I’ve found that it is better to start with some simple alerts so your audience can begin to learn what they mean and how to react. Over time, these alerts can become more refined and focused to capture complex situations.
• Does the alert draw the eye without being visually overwhelming or annoying? Here’s a article about how to “reduce visual noise” in dashboards.
• Is color used appropriately? Red means bad. Yellow is sorta bad. Green means good (but “good” things don’t need to be alerts). It isn’t particularly fair for color blind folks, but these conventions are deeply rooted.
• Have you found the best mechanism for presenting alerts? Alerts can be sent through e-mail, as SMS message, blasted over the office intercom system, or posted to the wall in the bathroom. What is the most convenient and appropriate medium?

Control: Advanced alert system should give users the ability to customize and manage alerts.

• Can the user identify the important alerts for them, and avoid the others? As hard as you may try in designing the dashboard or report, you aren’t in the shoes of the users. They will learn what they want to pay attention to and what information is extraneous.
• Can the user adjust the parameters? With more sophisticated dashboards, you want to give users the ability to adjust parameters to hone in on the exceptions that really require action.
• Can the user analyze alert frequency and trends? I’ve never seen a system that does this, but having the ability to view and analyze alert history seems critically important to getting a holistic view of performance.