UCD

This article focuses on designing the user experience for mobile Business Intelligence Dashboards accessed from Smartphones/Tablets. Some of the important aspects for designing user interfaces for Mobile BI Applications are screen size, platform (iOS, Android etc), connectivity issues, security etc. The most important success factor for mobile BI applications is user adaptation particularly because mobile phone is part of everyday life and hence the best medium for information delivery on the go.User centered mobile app design plays a pivotal role in encouraging smooth adaptation to Mobile BI and hence quicker ROI for customers.

So what is User Centered Design (UCD)? User-centered design (UCD) is a design philosophy where the end-user’s needs, wants and limitations are a focus at all stages within the design process and development lifecycle. Products developed using the UCD methodology are optimized for end-users and emphasis is placed on how the end-users need or want to use a product instead of forcing the end user to change his behavior to use the product. The goal of User-Centered Design (herein referred to as UCD) is to ensure that a product fulfills the needs and requirements of the users.

User Centered Mobile BI App Design Life cycle. User-Centered design (UCD) can be seen as an iterative process which starts by

1. Understanding the users-Understanding the Persona of the users in the mobile context, the way BBC didwhen building their future mobile strategy.

BBC’s mobile user groups (taken from their future mobile strategy) Today’s mobile audience primarily falls into four groups. “Mobile first” – people who use mobile as their primary access point to the internet. “Mobile lifestyle” – those who love the convenience of mobile services when they’re on the move. “Addicted devotees” – the gadget lovers on their phones all the time, even in the internet connected home, and “Social animals” – people particularly driven by social networking. When designing mobile BI applications as well the user persona needs to consider understanding the needs/expectations of the users. Understanding the Dashboards contexts of use and tasks. Based on the context and decision/tasks that users want to take there are three types of Mobile Operational dashboard: These dashboards display data that facilitate the operational side of a business.Think of an operational dashboard as monitoring the nerve center of your operation. Operational dashboards often require real-time or near real-time data.

Strategic / Executive: Strategic dashboards will typically provide the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) that a company’s executive team tracks on a periodic (daily, weekly or monthly basis). A strategic dashboard should provide the executive team with a high-level overview of the state of the business together with the opportunities the business faces. Analytical:An analytical dashboard could display operational or strategic data. However this type of dashboard will offer drill-down functionality – allowing the user to explore more of the data and get different insight.

Create the requirement specifications and usability goals for the product.

According to Nielsen (1993), the acceptability of a system covers social and practical acceptability, with the latter being further divided into usefulness, cost, compatibility and reliability of the system.On the other hand, usefulness itself can be further divided into utility and usability, whereas usability can be described with five criteria: 1) easy to learn, 2) efficient to use, 3) easy to remember, 4) few errors, and 5) subjectively pleasing.

User experience needs to be quantified in terms of UX metrics to meet the above criteria. However there are no standard metrics for Mobile BI applications.

User Centered Design for Mobile BI Dashboards HEART framework used at Google can be used to measure these user centered metrics.

 Happiness: measures of user attitudes often collected via survey. For example: satisfaction, perceived ease of use, and net-promoter score. Engagement: level of user involvement, typically measured via behavioral proxies such as frequency,intensity, or depth of interaction over some time period. Examples might include the number of visitsper user per week or the number of photos uploaded per user per day. Adoption: new users of a product or feature.. Retention: the rate at which existing users are returning.

  Task success: this includes traditional behavioral metrics of user experience, such as efficiency (e.g.time to complete a task), effectiveness (e.g. percent of tasks completed), and error rate. This category is most applicable to areas of your product that are very task-focused, such as search or an upload flow. Designing for mobile Phone/Tablets Real time/Near Real time:Since the users are mobile, they expect data to be real time or near real time.This might not be applicable to for all BI dashboards, however to derive the value from BI application the information presented by as latest as possible. Display Small chunks of Information but important: Mobile users have limited time and need access to information and move on.

Alerts: Timely information is critical, so alerting someone that there is new information or that something has changed has a huge impact on the usefulness and overall usage of a mobile application. Group Logical data elements: A well designed dashboard will ensure that data is displayed in logical groups. Focus on Information that are subject to change more often:

Information that need to be monitored and are subject to changed are followed by users more so it makes more sense to users to monitor these changes in mobile BI app. Keep UI simple: Successful BI app show just enough information to users to be satisfied or get their tasks completed and not more. Platform independent: With the advent of multiple mobile platforms, the mobile BI solution needs to customer using all these platforms equally. Shareable: The Dashboard or contents must be shareable to desired users to help aid in taking decisions or high critical data points.

Prototyping

Prototype with the above design in developed.

Usability Testing.

The prototype is released to the users and usability metrics are collected. Based on the usability metrics values discussions are conducted with users to further refine the requirements. The iterative process continues until the usability goals are achieved.

Benefits of User Centered Design

 Users are more satisfied. Dashboards are better usable and hence users are able derive better value Reduce time spent on training the users Reduce cost and time spent on re-design

Sources BBC’s mobile user groups (taken from their future mobile strategy) Jakob Nielsen’s model of System Acceptability Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications by GoogleCreate the requirement specifications and usability goals for the product.