Janelle Estes has an interesting article Seamlessness in the Cross-Channel User Experience describing how to support users as they start, work on and complete a task across multiple “channels”, such as a desktop, mobile app, the digital world and the real world.
She provides helpful examples of companies that support this experience well, including Home Depot, where a user interested in a particular product can:
- Search for it on the Home Depot website.
- After selecting a particular model, find a local store that has it in stock
- Request an email with that information
- Upon arriving at the store, use a mobile phone to read the email, and find the aisle number and quantity in stock.
The article is well worth reading and has implications for the BI space as well. A well designed dashboard might:
- Allow users and analysts to perform discovery about their daily job, e.g. find accounts receivable that are overdue
- Upon drilling down to a particular customer with an overdue account, view an actionable display that includes:
- Customer contact information
- Details about the overdue invoices, sufficient for the customer to track them down
- Invoice age bucket information
- This information could be produced in a form compact enough to be emailed to the customer with a note.
I can imagine any number of such task-oriented dashboards that improve focus, clarity, productivity and effectiveness. A key phrase to use might be actionable dashboard.
