Intentionally Constraining Yourself to Design BI Experiences

Imagine you're in the back of an Uber on the way to a meeting and need to get up-to-speed on how your organization has engaged with this account thus far. You're staring at your iPad: what is on the first page in your BI dashboard?

Your organization creates tons of data every day and there are endless ways to consider how to combine those in complex ways to tell a story.

However, if we push ourselves into a very specifically sized box, we're forced to:

• Design for glanceability

• Focus on truly essential metrics

• Prioritize fast comprehension over digging deep to form insights

Even with these constraints, there are common traps to avoid:

1. Overloading too many metrics into a single view reduces comprehension and likely includes non-essential metrics

2. Choosing visualizations that don't align with the story reduces glanceability and clarity

3. Expecting BI to perform a bunch of data transformations reduces rendering speed

We can even extend this mindset hierarchically to satisfy different stakeholder groups or functions.

Let's work through this example:

1. An executive's perspective and a marketer's perspective about how healthy a relationship is with a given account will vary

2. By applying this constraints-driven mindset, we can design two experiences that satisfy the needs of each group

3. And, the best case is that a marketer can see their perspective, then explore the other perspectives to understand a more complete picture

Even if you're not designing this within a BI platform (e.g. Power BI or Tableau), this mindset can apply to the analytics you rollout within CRM as dashboards and embedded charts on record pages.

TLDR: Use hard constraints to force better designs for BI experiences. What matters most when you only have one screen and two minutes?

Bonus: Do you want to play along as though you're riding in the Uber on the way to meet an account?

Here's a fun exercise to get you plugged into this mindset:

1. Draft an email or open a new document

2. Start a timer for 2 minutes

3. Write as many questions as possible that you'd want answers to before your meeting

4. Start a timer for 1 minute

5. Bold or highlight only 3 to 5 of those questions