Cognitive Benefits of a Simple Visual Metrics Architecture

Many organizations produce metrics dashboards that take a long time to develop, are visually inconsistent, require specialized staff and skills, and (of most concern) don’t clearly and rapidly identify actions or draw focus for further analysis. We addressed these issues, and realized unanticipated benefits as well, by creating a strong design and development architecture. Our results include: a templated set of metric visualizations, a radical decrease in cycle time, and realizing “self-service” business intelligence capabilities, empowering business users with expert domain knowledge to own and develop metrics. In this presentation, we discuss the visual architecture and design, the small set of templates, and the cognitive benefits of the visualizations now in use. The approach has garnered success at the company, program, directorate, and department levels, in large part due to the low cognitive burden for visualization understanding and development.