With BI reporting, you will greatly reduce project time and increase impact by spending more time on design and wireframing up front. In other words: go slow to go fast. Our recommended approach may seem paradoxical, but if you’ve ever been frustrated by marginal results after a quick report build, you’ll want to minimize the never-ending iterations that invariably follow.

Thoughtful report design prevents rework

If you don’t spend time on good design, you invariably end up doing lots of iterative redesign.

Brick Thompson, CEO, Blue Margin

Blue Margin builds in a distinct design phase for each dashboarding project to align on the business case and most important metrics that will drive better decisions, prioritization, and accountability. Get those right, and you’ll improve your business outcomes. Resisting the temptation to jump into development for quick delivery, we’ve found the real value comes through careful design. It produces dashboards that people adopt, that ‘touch the nerve’, and that prevent rework and wasted effort. Experts agree that reports developed with situational context deliver the best results and require fewer iterations (Knaflic, 2015).

Create contextual BI reports

To develop strong contextual dashboards, report developers should be asking end-users questions such as:

  • What value will this report generate?
  • What metrics do you view on a daily basis?
  • What further questions do those metrics raise?
  • What decisions do they lead to?
  • What outcomes are impacted, and by how much?

[In design], we start with really understanding what’s most important for the business user. Ultimately, this is going to lead to greater adoption of the reports once they’re developed.

Will Trickett, Senior Data Visualization Engineer, Blue Margin

In the podcast episode, Why Spend Time on Report Design and Wireframing, Brick Thompson, Blue Margin’s CEO, and Will Trickett, Senior Data Visualization Engineer, discuss the cost savings (and other benefits) of beginning reporting efforts with thoughtful design and wireframe reviews. They also share why a consultative approach (rather than order-taking) by the report developer leads to more effective dashboards and stronger adoption. After all, the goal is to incorporate key data into your thinking. Dashboards that don’t get adopted are a waste of effort and create resistance to future efforts to become data-driven.

Listen to the episode below or read the full transcript.