Crystal Blogger

The dust has settled for the Dashboard Challenge

These past two weeks have been crazy. We found out Sunday afternoon Aug 22 what Dashboard we were going to create. Mine was the Internet Usage Dashboard and it was due by Aug 27. Small problem was that I had already planned a vacation and was leaving Aug 26. Oh, and I work during the day.

In order to successfully build a dashboard you have to brainstorm and make a rough draft on paper. You need to know your data to generate the general outline, what components will be placed where. Where will the User interact, what dials, drill-downs, and buttons are you going to use. I did none of that.

From the start my very flawed strategy was to go and see what kind of data is available because I thought that would help drive the design. Wrong again, there is so much statistical data out on the Web about the Web that it only confused me more. So I finally sat down and thought what data is available and what is the cool and fun statistics that I want to share. I found internet usage statistics for Antarctica. So does that mean that Penguins are surfing the net?

I wanted my entry page to have some splash, but what kind of splash can you make with yearly statistics? I started to browse the components to see what jumped out at me. It wasn’t until I got to the maps that my idea started to come together for both the Dashboard and what data I wanted to find.

I found some statistics by Continent, then by Country/State. I was happy but that did not last long when I started to put the data together with the map components. Dashboard data needs to be in contiguous rows with the first column being the identifier. So I created two tabs of Excel data, one for Continents and the other for Country/State.

This is where you need to have the tissues ready for this sad paragraph. I have learned that not everyone that collects and reports statistical information agrees on what area a Continent covers. Some blur the line between Regions and Continents. Once I sorted that layer out I had to align the Continent key on the Dashboard with those in my data. Next was to place the Country/State in their respective Continent again according to the Dashboard map. When you have a white area on a Dashboard map it means the map key did not match a row of data. I spent 10 hours mapping and rearranging data so that map keys and data keys matched. Did you know that China is not just China, but Hong Kong and Macao? Or how many countries in Africa have changed names, split or changes names and split? Don’t get me started on Russia.

So now all the data is mapped but I still don’t have any splash. So I start to explore Charts, but again what data is interesting? I finally decided that the Charts would contain data that when I saw I said “Really?” Information like what are people really doing on their cell phone? Is Google really the number one search site?

When I was nearly done I showed it to my Mom and she said “So how does this work?” I was stunned; here I am almost finished when I completely forgot why I was creating this Dashboard. That was to introduce and showcase the Crystal Dashboard tool. So I spent the next couple of hours making Help icons and associating them with Label boxes that would guide the new User or potential buyer through the Dashboard and what the tool was about.

When I was done I went back to my Mom and said here is the Dashboard and watched her interact. We did not talk as she read the introduction page and started to explore. She navigated from the Global map to the Continental maps. Clicked on countries, used the Fisheye menu, read data, printed a page and reset the Dashboard a couple of times. I was happy.

So I asked my Mom the first time User how was her experience. She first told me all the obligatory Mom stuff like “I’m so proud of you”, “You’re so smart” then we got down to business. She pointed out all of the misspelled words, the grammar and punctuation. She pointed out things that did not make sense or saw numbers that had no label. I wasn’t feeling so smart at this point.

In the end I felt I did a pretty good job considering the time line, the data and my previous exposure/experience with Crystal Dashboards. This was my first Dashboard I have created from scratch outside of the classroom. I have modified others but never created from scratch.

I really enjoyed creating this Dashboard for everyone. I hope you enjoy interacting with it. Our individual XLF files should be available after the Labor Day weekend on the Reportapalooza site. I will also post mine here over this weekend. Have a happy and safe Labor Day weekend.

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