Conveying Information Clearly with SAP’s LAVA Design Language
What’s wrong with this picture? Or better yet, can you find anything right about it? Let’s answer the first question about this design, presumably used to communicate relevant quantitative information to interested users.
- Yes, car dashboards communicate critical status information to drivers about the car, and yes, software information displays convey critical status information about their respective operational processes. But the necessary physical forms and associated limitations of the former do not need to be carried over to digital applications where the same constraints are not present. Such metaphors can be useful to introduce new ideas to people using similar, familiar forms, but they quickly become a burden. Such techniques are known as “skeuomorphism”.
- Related to this is the preponderance of round information displays, like pie charts and rotary dials. These less-efficient and -effective holdovers from mechanical displays don’t illustrate one-dimensional quantitative expressions well, due to 1: Our mind’s difficulty in accurately perceiving spatial relationships of round areas, and 2: The difficulty of inserting text titles in the resulting irregular shapes.
- Traffic lights are a universal standard for saying “stop, go, caution” but are an awkward, forced translation into “bad, good, and so-so”.
- A lack of clear visual display hierarchy, clear relationships between charts, and any means to extend, customize, annotate, or collaborate around the display result in an isolated and inert communication vehicle (pun not intended).
The good part of the example is the use of horizontal bar charts with labels placed above the bars. This practice provides ample space for full labels, a wider bar area for more precise quantitative plots, and a clear comparison between the grouped bars. This technique, along with a host of others, is being built into SAP’s visual analytic tools thanks to LAVA, the new visual analytics design language.
Design Languages provide a basic set of guidelines, forms, and techniques to be used across products to ensure best practices, consistency, and reliability. They are the means by which products from lines such as Apple hardware & software and BMW automobiles can have unique purposes while still looking and working in similar and familiar ways.
LAVA design is composed of 6 main factors:
- Lean Appearance: Similar to the design trend of “flat design”, Lean is a clean, minimal display style that focuses on the data itself versus on irrelevant faux decorations like gradations, drop shadows, or reflective surfaces.
THIS NOT THIS
2. Points: SAP’s proprietary library of “mini charts”. Points are a specialized, small-size chart format with pre-determined constraints to ensure clear and efficient depiction of simple quantitative facts. Think of them as “chart tweets”.
3. Channels: Channels are simple containers for displaying and navigating to multiple Points and Charts. Channels represent a familiar and cross-device way to collect and deploy analytic components in a display space. Clicking or tapping the left/right arrows, or swiping on a touch screen, cycle among peer charts collected within the Channel. Channels of different chart type or topic can be stacked within a Board for hassle-free layouts
4. Boards: A Board is a simple dashboard-like space, but renamed to create distance from the previous generation of “dashboards” and their legacy constraints. Initially these will be simple containers for Channels and free-standing charts, and will be expanded to provide templates suited to known analytic consumption purposes.
5. Lattices: The Lattice is a new visualization component in the emerging category of Metacharts. Metacharts are bigger and more sophisticated than a typical chart, but smaller and less specific than a custom analytic application. They fill a niche to provide pre-configured and embeddable display, manipulation, personalization, and light analysis experiences to a wider body of less-technical and less-analytic users.
The Lattice is essentially a multi-layer, manipulable bar chart, enabling user-driven drill-down filtering and other operations. Its manipulation controls are embedded in the content display itself, doing away with the separate palettes, toolbars, and control panels located in the frames of traditional applications. The Lattice provides a consistent, accessible window into any conventional multi-dimensional data set.
Due to their self-contained manipulation controls, they are particularly useful for embedding within other operational applications. Their small screen footprint
is also a benefit for space-constrained mobile displays where direct touch manipulation with content displays is the convention.
6. Sn@p navigation: The Sn@p Navigation model enables the fluid creation and curation of visual analytic environments and collections. This includes user-driven re-use of Points, such as collecting them into Highlights pages and having them serve as small-footprint representations of their parent Boards while embedded within other applications. It also includes fluid navigation among Boards within a user’s collection.
Initially the model will rely on the Point as the basic unit of analytic expression and content exchange, and it has the potential to render large, deep collections of formal or informal nested environments of analytic content in a rational and consistent structure.
Hopefully this provides a good first overview of the LAVA design language and what it means for the future of SAP’s analytic product offerings. LAVA’s Lean
Appearance is now the default for SAP visual analytics. In future posts we will elaborate on how & when LAVA will be made available in Lumira and
elsewhere.
Credit goes to SAP Product Designers John Armitage, Julian Gosper, and Nick Weed for providing their LAVA-based design examples.
Hi Anita,
Thanks for sharing these examples.
Regards
Angad
Loved everything in your post. But now the big question: Are there any solid plans to start rolling this out to the Analytic Suite ? Which is the first candidate ?
Hi Santiago,
I don't have a lot I can share at this moment but I think we will be able to discuss some early details in about a month or so. I'll be posting something here and also of course putting it out on twitter - (I'm @AnitaGibbings on twitter).
Best Regards,
Anita
Hi Anita,
Just followed you (here and in twitter). For us this is a critical question mark on our BI Strategy. We've always used SAP analytics -even when it was just bw- but now there are so many other options in the market that offer niche products with UIs much more elaborated which obviously back our internal customers complaints about us being always behind. Whenever you have something that you can share, please let me know.
Thanks for your reply !
Hi Santiago,
Thanks for commenting - it helps us create more sense of urgency to have statements like this. As I said we don't have a lot more we can say right now but this is the direction that we are moving. Keep providing feedback along the way -
Thanks,
Anita
A great read. I am glad(relieved) to see SAP not ignoring the hot trend of story-board and infographics in analytics.
You must consider that the visual design of SAP Dashboards had not been updated since the iPhone 1 was introduced.
I think the storyboard concept and storytelling is a fantastic way to communicate information. However, to tell a story you need context (Text). If we are designing the "next generation" of visual storytelling, we must identify what is good, what is bad, and provide context to what it all means. You can call it a report, dashboard, or storyboard, but an assembly of charts on a page describes data, not necessarily meaning. That is the next evolutionary leap that has to take place here.
Predictive analytics is the end game for most organizations at this juncture but there is a huge gap between descriptive and predictive.. Unfortunately LAVA while cool looking just makes the the descriptive piece look better, not communicate better.
I do think however, having this level of design through the portfolio would help boost adoption and satisfaction by end users. Excited to see if this gets picked up by all of the product teams!
Seems like someone got the memo! this is what the market has been waiting for so long. I hope this gets the highest priority ASAP. Since when is this project been going for? I was at SAPPHIRE´s BI influence council meeting and nothing was even mentioned about this. - Frustrating.
Is LAVA going to be CVOM based or an extension to CVOM or does it come or is it its own charting engine?
Some of the LAVA concepts are being implemented in CVOM charts. But LAVA is a larger concept than CVOM. CVOM is a charting library, and CVOM charts (and extensions) can be used in an application that follows the LAVA principles. LAVA is a design philosophy describing how all the user interface components can fit together to present a unified and clear message to the end user.
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Hi Anita,
Just one question that I have been thinking about since I have read this blog. Does "LAVA" stand for something?
Regards
Angad
Lightweight Applied Visual Analytics
I received a few emails asking about my comments above so I elaborated on my thoughts with a blog post: http://ryangoodman.net/blog/index.php/2013/08/19/sap-lava-groundbreaking-design-or-just-another-bar-chart/
Thanks for sharing with us Anita! Excited to see more in upcoming months.
Hi Anita,
Any chance that you will share some more details at the upcoming ASUG conference in september?
I see a potential for embedding small, efficient visualizations with BI-content in our operational applications. A critical succes factor for this is performance; how fast will the visualization load and show. I guess this is not part of LAVA but rather part of each visualization engine implementing the concepts in LAVA?
Regards,
Simon
Simon,
There is a bit of confusion in general as to what LAVA is and is not. I'm back in the office (I was out Thurs/Fri) and working on a document that I hope will answer your question and the others posted here and otherwise.
Best Regards,
Anita
Looking forward to read your document because, yes, there is a bit of confusion regarding what is LAVA and how is it related to the new Analytics products.
Thanks for sharing this new and cutting edge stuff 🙂
MJ
Hi Anita,
Loved your post. I look forward to your future updates.
Thanks,
Arun
Hi,
Lean design and mobility. Future was yesterday 🙂
Hi Anita,
I have noticed the change in the Look & Feel in Exporer & Dashboards since a while & I am glad to read such an excellant concept & future for SAP Visualizations.....
Although, I feel that many of our customers are still using very basic charting (bar, graphs & pies only) ....I think it is very important to go through this program.
I also have a question......will there be any tools to convert already existing documents, dashboards & reports from our classical charting (which is still different according to pre-BI 4.x Tools)......or we will have to re-devlop the existing documents ! ! !
Any conversion tools.........will help to deploy .............and avoid spending more time & money
😉
Hi Karim,
I'm glad that you like the look and feel of LAVA, this kind of customer feedback is very important for us. I'd love to tell you that there will be tools to convert already existing documents but there is nothing on the roadmap for this. I agree it is a big project to move existing content over to this look and feel. Please think about submitting it to our idea place to make sure it gets in front of the development team and that way if others want this too, they can vote for it.
You can find ideas place for:
Design Studio: https://ideas.sap.com/ct/s.bix?c=6055F3C4-E8DA-454F-9C49-85D5A5070BCE
Dashboards:
https://ideas.sap.com/ct/s.bix?c={E827808B-89E8-45A5-BBA9-9A3F6F1DA703}
Lumira:
https://ideas.sap.com/ct/s.bix?c={6013C007-A70B-4283-93CE-2531683D816D}
Explorer:
https://ideas.sap.com/ct/s.bix?c={62E6D918-A8E2-4421-9FE8-488E934A2F9B}
LAVA is good idea!
I've posted a 'how to' to tell you how we built the "LAVA" style Dashboard demo that we have been using. Obviously some work around so you have to be careful of how much data you push as you overlay a couple of charts but if you liked they style this is one way to get started today.
http://scn.sap.com/community/businessobjects-dashboards/blog/2013/10/24/how-did-we-build-the-lava-dashboard-demo
Finally some more details and clarification on Project LAVA for you on my new post: http://scn.sap.com/community/business-intelligence/blog/2013/10/25/the-what-and-why-of-project-lava