Analytics: Application Developer (Siebel 7.

7)

Module 16: Design Principles

and Best Practices
Module Objectives

After completing this module you will be able to:

 Identify recommended design principles and best
practices related to the presentation of information in
Intelligence Dashboards

Why you need to know:

 As an analytics application developer, you want to ensure
that your users are able to use the data effectively and
that the applications’ performance is optimized

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Dashboard Design Tips

Performance

Readability

Security

Filtering

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Performance
 Avoid designing Dashboards that return too much data
 Avoid designing requests that use overly complex queries
 Use smaller requests that link to other requests for additional
detail
 Use Guided Navigation to link smaller Dashboards

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Readability
 Use fewer columns
 More columns in a request are not necessarily better
 Simplicity can tell the reader what is going on in one look
 Use charts to simply views of data
 Use conditional formatting to focus attention on data outside
given parameters

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Security
 Use security groups to filter out irrelevant or unwanted
Dashboards for users
 Organize Dashboards by user role to help users locate the data
they are interested in

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Filtering
 Ensure global filters have a default value
 Setting value to nothing or all will return all the data and impact
performance
 Setting a default value creates a smaller data set

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Charting Design Tips

Pie

Bar

Line

Funnel

Pareto

Scatter

Area

Radar

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Pie
 Pie charts are used to portray the contribution of the parts to a
whole

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Bar
 Bar charts draws comparisons between items, but not to a
whole
 Horizontal bar charts imply an emphasis on time
 Vertical bar charts remove the emphasis on time

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Line
 Line charts show one variable changing over time

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Funnel
 Funnel charts are used to graphically represent data that
changes over different periods or stages
 Funnel charts are well-suited for showing actual compared to
targets for data where the target is known to decrease (or
increase) significantly per stage, such as a sales pipeline

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Pareto
 Pareto charts used to ranking causes from most significant to
least significant (80/20 rule or Pareto Principle)
 Bars on left relatively more important than those on right

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Scatter
 Scatter charts show the correlation of two sets of numbers by
plotting where the variables intersect.
 Scatter charts are useful when the coordinates on the horizontal
scale, often time intervals, are irregular

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Area
 Area charts shows the relative importance of values over a
period of time
 Similar to a line chart, but emphasizes the amount of change
(magnitude of values) rather than the rate of change

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Radar
 Radar charts are a graphical display of the differences between
actual and ideal performance

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Summary

This module showed you how to:

 Identify recommended design principles and best
practices related to the presentation of information in
Intelligence Dashboards

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