Designing attractive and useful reports can either be an overlooked process or an extremely time-consuming process. Over the next few weeks I will be documenting my process which I find helps prevent either of these things starting with 8 questions I ask before designing a report or dashboard. The form of the report does not matter for the sake of this series but the example used will be a BI Report such as Power BI or Tableau.
Report Goals
4 questions I will ask the stakeholders
I’ve observed this being the most overlooked process. Sometimes there is a request something along the lines of ‘Can you please produce a report on the products we sell the most’ and the building begins! I have learnt over the years that there are a few key questions that I wish to have answered before I even begin.
Who is the audience for this report?
Is it for the person requesting to explore and make a decision, is it for a presentation, is it an ongoing report that will need to be periodically refreshed or is it to provide real-time data for a team?
What decisions will this enable?
Often the requestor has not fully thought through the possibilities, it could be just an intrigue that they have. This is a good opportunity to explore this together. It can also inform what additional data to include, it can also inform what data to leave out.
Do you wish to see historical trends?
The products that are currently selling the most may not be as informative unless they are put into context, establishing this context is important. Finding this out after doing data collection is vital to ensure it’s done correctly the first time.
What segmentation would you like to see?
Is it geographically based, demographic, channel etc. This will help double handling when it comes time to do the data collection process.
4 questions I will ask myself
How experienced are the users?
This determines the level of detail and complexity allowed in the report, it also informs if you should include filters and interactivity to allow them to drill down on the data.
How many users will there be?
Typically the larger the user base, the more high level the report will be. It’s not an absolute rule but the scale of your audience is certainly useful to keep in mind during the design phase.
Will I be including analysis and executive summary?
Analysis and notes during the process can be valuable if you are going to be performing analysis yourself. Your commentary may dictate the best visuals to use and it can be hard to context shift to analysis when you’ve spent hours staring at the data.
Will this consolidate current reports?
If this is the case, it can be vital to ensure that questions currently being answered by that report are incorporated. It may also mean there is a data set that you can start with.
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