Are you still struggling with these problems?

• Reports are perfectly designed, comprehensive, and powerful, but the business just doesn’t use them?
• I made the template completely according to the requirements of the business, but in the end it couldn’t meet their needs?
• Clearly indicators are very complete, but the business said that my report has no value?

If you encounter any of these problems, you may be walking into some reporting design mistakes:

I. Common mistakes in report design

1, rich content, not prominent focus

Do you think that the more content you present, the more valuable the report is, but that’s not the case. A report, where does the user look? What is the core of what you want to show? Therefore, we should adhere to the principle that what users need most is placed in the most prominent position, and highlighted. If necessary, we can split the report that solves a problem into multiple reports.

2, only data, no indicators

Statement is not a simple list of data, there is no comparison, there is no index, the number of visits is high, how much is low, a single data does not have much value, and derivative indicators often make you unexpected effects, such as year-on-year, sequential, proportion and other derivative indicators.

3. Reasonable indicators and problematic dimensions

In the process of doing the report, part of the point of view of the rationality of index in index is no problem, but combined with the business logic will find some unreasonable, increasingly figure such as a product sales, sales of the product daily fluctuations change may be large, trend may be especially severe fluctuation of year, so don’t see any change, We should look at these indicators with a monthly or weekly trend.

4. Different tables and indicators contradict each other in the result data

With the continuous increase in the number of reports, many indicators will appear correlation cross and so on. Sometimes, the same indicator will have different values in different places, or appear logical contradictions. This requires us to strengthen dimension table completeness monitoring and missing value processing, unified rules of indicators and unified sources to reduce the probability of error. Construct data middle layer to realize index reuse.

5, the report into a query system

There is also a situation is, we do the report data is very comprehensive, the user to want what data can look it up yourself, this time, you may secretly secretly pleased, am I doing reporting features more powerful, but in fact is we didn’t do the report, the data and the analysis of the large space, business people to get the data on analysis of the secondary, What our reports show is not what the business ultimately wants.

Do as required, but can not meet the demand

It is often the case that the requirements mentioned by the business do not meet their actual needs. The report developer does exactly what he asks, but no one uses it. Why is this?

On the one hand, the requirements proposed by the business are his imagination, not his requirements, but his plans. Therefore, we need to explore his original needs from the very beginning and evaluate whether the original needs can be satisfied according to his proposed plans. “Sometimes what he wants is not a good horse, but a faster journey to a distant place”.

How to deeply understand the report requirements? 5W analysis method can be used. When the IT department receives the report requirements, IT should first understand the application scenarios of the report in the business.

Second, the characteristics of report design

Report is only a means to reduce cost and increase efficiency, and only users who feel truly valuable will be willing to use it. Therefore, report development should be more close to the actual business scenarios, rather than just stay at the data level. Different roles of users determine the different design styles of reports.

When you make statements, you must have a clear goal. What information can you let users know about this statement and what problems can be found through this graph? Only with a clear goal can you choose the most reasonable indicator.

The key point you want to express is to use a special color warning mark, do not be colorful, everywhere is the key, too much information interference but drown out the key content.

Having said that, what are the specific dimensions that report design should focus on to make it as good as possible?

1. Indicator field

When selecting fields, users’ needs should be fully understood, that is, the “Why” mentioned above. Taking store sales daily as an example, the purpose is to know the daily sales situation of stores statistically. The corresponding “What” is relatively clear.

The core concern must be sales and sales volume, but if only two indicators of sales and sales can really let store managers know whether today’s sales situation is good or bad? The answer is clearly no.

What are today’s estimated sales figures? What are the actual sales figures? Did you accomplish your goal or did you not accomplish your goal? What is the rate of achievement if you don’t accomplish your goal?

From the category dimension, what are the sales volume and sales volume of these products sold in stores?

Store managers also need to know the situation of each employee. How much is the sales volume of each employee? What are the sales figures? How many performance targets did he achieve for each employee? Year-on-year progress or regression?

Once you have the core of what you want to show, what should you do with the template

2, user-friendly

• filter

Filtering conditions are an important means for users to accurately find the information they want. They generally come from important fields of reports, but not all fields are suitable for filtering conditions. In this process, you need to think carefully about which filters are useful and which ones don’t make much sense.

For example, we want to get the right data from a large amount of data. For example, in a web format report, only the records of paid orders are displayed

• Export convenient

After screening the data they want, some users also need to export reports for subsequent business use. When designing reports, you need to give a little thought to how reports are downloaded.

• The report permissions

The report is the summary and display of the company’s core data, not all data can be displayed casually, the report permission Settings become very important, in the beginning of the report design needs to determine which roles and positions in the system can see this report.

• The report performance

If you’ve worked so hard to design a report and it goes live, but because it takes five minutes to preview a report, you’re a user and you’re in a state of mind, it must be pretty hopeless.

There are many factors affecting performance, among which the large amount of data is a headache. The new computing engine can be used to relieve the pressure of big data through asynchronous counting

In terms of real-time data, if the real-time data is not particularly high, we can also use the cache to solve the performance problems of some templates

• Data push

When a report needs to be generated and published on a regular basis, when things have to be repeated on a regular basis, or when a set of values in the report reaches a certain threshold and needs to be notified to a specific person, timing is a boon.

Iii. How to promote the use of reports

The final application effect of reports not only depends on the initial report making, but also the monitoring in place is very important. A good management and monitoring of reports can find the problems in the running process of reports in the first time and follow up and solve them in time to ensure good user experience.

User usage monitoring enables us to have a better understanding of the real usage of reports, find the gap between applications and expectations, compare and improve in time.

At the same time, we should return to the users after the report has been online for a period of time, take the initiative to inquire about the situation of the current report, modify the deficiencies or explore new needs.

Most of the time, business people can not imagine the requirements of statements out of thin air, which is very normal, but after seeing statements, or after using for a period of time, there will be some further ideas, and we have to do is to gradually explore their use habits, and constantly enrich the content requirements.

Ps: the report tool in this article is provided to you, reply to “report” can!