Four dashboard design lessons from the BBC Weather site

[former_member188942]

Over the last two weeks I posted a series of articles which explained four key lessons which I believe the BBC Weather site teaches us about dashboard design and delivery. For those who didn't have time to read all four posts in depth, here is a quick summary of what they covered:

OLAP and ease-of use as the future of dashboards
Modern dashboards present their users with both summarized information and the ability to easily get to more detailed information through simple, intuitive navigation. A near perfect example of this modern dashboard is the BBC Weather web-site, which embodies the concepts of interactivity and OLAP/multi-dimensional data navigation. It offers a powerful model of what we should be striving for when we deliver dashboards in a business context. Read the full post

Dashboards and Big Data
The BBC Weather site is based on a data set which is many times larger and processed using much more computation than almost any business-based data set, yet it delivers its results through a no-training-required interface. This provides great balance to some of the hype currently circulating around Big Data and the way it should be used in organizations. Most importantly, it shows, categorically, that easy to use dashboards can deliver-up the results of Big Data for consumption by a wide, non-specialist audience. Read the full post

Dashboards and HTML5
The BBC Weather site is built using a “pure” HTML/JavaScript interface and this is one of many indications that HTML5 is likely to be the dominant technology for delivering dashboards in the future. Read the full post

Dashboards and Predictive
Weather forecasting is all about predicting the future. However, the incredibly sophisticated predictive analysis build into the BBC weather site (indeed, built into all weather sites) is completely transparent to the user; they just use the site like any other, getting insight and understanding based on the underlying predictive algorithms without being aware of them. Read the full post

These lessons, coupled with increasing demand for mobile delivery, point towards a future for BI which revolves around dashboards. I am certain that over the coming years interactive dashboards will come to dominate end-user delivery of BI and finally breakthrough the 20-25% user adoption ceiling where BI has stalled for so many years.

All of these issues are driving forces in the product development of our XWIS product. To see how XWIS can help deliver BBC Weather web-site like simplicity to your SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards / Xcelsius projects, watch the short video below or visit the resource centre on Antivia's web-site for a selection on on-demand webinars on the topic.