In this post I look at a different approach to BI personas and explore the needs of the dynamic user. Exploring the possibility that whilst users will always need to use BI for their primary objective, they may also want to use other features (collaboration, social network-esque tools and advanced analytics) which may not match their original persona and are perhaps being blocked or hidden.
Pablo Picaso is reported to have said “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”. I take from this that Picasso was expressing his desire to forget about all of the preconceived notions, opinions and expectations in order to have a completely open, inquisitive mind (rather than eating a Crayola or two with a side helping of mud).
This started me thinking about the things I do on BI projects (not the Crayola / mud bit), am I blinkered? Am I too hasty to go down a certain route - stick in another dashboard, scorecard or whizzy chart without thinking about what is best or what the user will be looking for? Do I lead users down a route when there might be a less ostentatious approach or do I limit the user too much by trying to make things overly simple? Do I think enough about catering to different users abilities within a role?
I am not suggesting going back to first principles, but maybe having a different approach to deciding which BI interfaces to use or considering the user experience more would deliver better solutions? I still think that following the reporting premises of:
- Is it actionable?
- Asking the who, why, where, what …?
- And performing good analysis.
Are as near to panaceas as I think we will get when designing what data to show. Combining this with personas will provide a powerful story for the data and reports a user should have and what their hot buttons will be. But will it cover the full user journey? For this piece I am not thinking of the typical approach to BI personas where we tend to map to roles, like this Microsoft example, because whilst undoubtedly useful in certain contexts, I am interested in a more user centric approach which may sometimes be missed. Actually looking at the users skills rather than their role may offer a richer experience – potentially helping adoption, higher visibility, collaboration and ultimately better results through the use of insight which may have gone unseen. For example, a typical BI persona approach could lead us to having the following requirements - the CEO will need a high level view of the organisation against certain goals and targets and an area manager will want to see the performance of their region against others – great, we can do that relatively easily, but both may also be keen users of social network or analytical tools or messenger tools and would like to see some of that functionality too rather than being lead down the route of “you need a dash board of your 10 KPIs with RAG status for YTD, MTD and WTD with some simple drill down”, I am being slightly callous and obviously this is not how it would be done in real life, but hopefully you see where I am coming from. Reading a Gartner article about Generation V (V for Virtual) reinforced this for me, people will hop across boundaries and profiles and this will be true for BI – making it impossible to accurately categorise users. So when evaluating interfaces and visualisations I was thinking that we need to go down the route of meeting the primary needs of the user (i.e what they absolutely need to do) but also giving the user an interface which is exploreable and can move with their changing needs and experiences. This led me to a Maslow-esque pyramid of need, where by the next level inherits the previous. Below I have mapped Maslow’s categories to BI equivalents, which hopefully highlights where I am trying to get to:
The categories above could be used to enhance the existing approach to BI personas or could be used as part of a larger user experience focus within BI projects. Going back to our CEO example, looking at these categories - they will need to be able to do their standard reports but they should also have the scope to move up or down the pyramid whenever they want to. Therefore BI interfaces could be improved if we designed them with the aim to empower users to move freely and use all of the functionality available.
As always I would really like to hear your comments and thoughts,
John