Week 10 Notes

Lecture Objectives

• Explain the role and importance of the user interface in BI applications
• Explain impact individual user difference can have on the effectiveness of a BI application
• Explain key principles of good interface usability and data visualization.

Intro

We have to understand that vendors try to sell very weird ideas, like UIs need to be very standardized so that the users don't need to "think" at all. This is so wrong, since we can never fully contemplate what the user wants, hence, the requirements need to come from the user through information gathering techniques like CSF / BSF.

Growing Problems
The problems that the industry is facing are:

• more licenses have been sold that active users, meaning the BI apps are not being used
• Excel and Access which gives users another way to access the data, bypassing the BI system
• BI Analysts need to understand that they have to focus more on the UI, than just the technical back-end, like data modelling and integration.

The Nature of DSSBI systems are meant to be small, personalised focused system, which are able to perform urgent tasks quickly, at the speed of thought.

BI's integral theme is evolutionary, where the user uses the system, they gain knowledge and  understand it better, and along the way their perspective changes, and then the system needs to adapt otherwise it becomes irrelevant to the business is dropped.

Implications on a BI Analyst

• they need to understand the decision making process and also how executive think
• need powerful and flexible tools that allow us to quickly and easily make changes to the system based on user requests.
• need a good infrastructure, both data warehouse and also very skilled and experienced staff members to efficiently work with the system.
• need to win the trust of the users, in order to make them trust the data and the system itself.Decision makers will not use the system if they can't trust it. Trust means that the users can easily verify the output that they see.

Requirements of a good UI

• Speed of interaction - user should be able perform operations at the speed of though, and not click and wait.
• Interface overload - the UI should not be getting in the way of the analysis, and hence should be kept to a minimum.
• Ease and convenience - users should not need to use manuals, the usage should be intuitive to allow users to quickly adapt.
• Memorability - users should be able to recall easily how to use the system after being away from the system for sometime.