Business analysis made (more) easy
The associative model (Green, White and Grey) within QlikView is really an important component. Combined with objects and charts from a ‘point-and-qlik-analysis’ perspective, apps can add substantial business benefits! Giving users this power is key for every application that is going to be developed. Keep that in mind.
Simplicity comes with a few principles which are crucial, in my opinion, for business users:
- The 10 second rule: this rule should help you give your users speed of thought interaction and analysis. It might not be 10 seconds for every task or screen, but keep in mind that every action or goal a user wants to achieve should not take to much of his time
- The 3 click rule: this rule should help any user not to keep clicking around in his search for information that will help him in his decision making process. Not every action or task can be developed with this rule in mind. But I guess everybody will know what the take away is for this.
An asset in every QlikView app could be a distribution of dimension values over any KPI. For example; the distribution of customers over sales buckets. A few benefits which come with these kind of visualizations are:
- Selection of customers within a specific range of performance
- Quick and easy analysis with ‘point-and-qlik’ and spotting the chunks of data on which a decision has to be made
- More freedom and flexibility for user driven analysis, for example; defining your own bucket size or the KPI on which you want to distribute dimension values
An example to get the idea:
Now any selection on one of these bars will activate a selection of the customers in this bucket. Very simple, very fast.
An other example is adding simple filters (listboxes) to the canvas with criteria based on the outcomes of a KPI. For example; adding a filter with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ based on whether a customer reached the margin target or not. This can be done by adding a listbox with a calculated dimension like:
=if(
aggr((sum({1}SalesPrice*Quantity)
-
sum({1}(CostPrice)*Quantity))
/
sum({1}SalesPrice*Quantity)
, Customer)
>= 0.20
, 'Yes'
, 'No'
)
The listbox will look like this:
Here the activated selection (‘Yes’) will only show customers which had a ‘gross margin %’ greater or equal to 20%.
Hopefully this helps with making your analysis for your users more easy. If so, please let me know and if you have any feedback or other great ideas for analysis please let me know.
Have fun!
I use a different 10 second rule during my trainings, if it doesn’t work in 10 seconds I casually move on as if nothing was wrong 😉
When developing QlikView applications, I try to stick to the 3 second rule (and preferably, less). The less interruptions, the easier to it is to stay in the ‘flow’ of the application. An interesting study about the effect of interruptions can be found here: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/143/1/215/
Regarding the Yes/No filter boxes, those work great. A minor improvement, as you’re using {1} on all your expressions you might as well move the entire calculation to the script. This will help drive down the wait-time for your users (at a very limited increase of memory) and will also let you use this ‘flag’ field in other calculations.
Barry, what you are saying makes sense to me. There are many models and ideas around user experience (UX) and the diversity in all these approaches don’t make it much easier. What I think I’d like to add to this post also is that these rules are here to get us started thinking about UX. Having said that I hope people get a feeling for how to design user interfaces that help the user find its way and accomplish his task.