My first piece of advice, stop using PDFs to share your reports. Now I know that 95% of you will not follow that advice. Even if PDFs are shown to be unfit for human consumption, they are still the status quo reporting tool for most organizations. (For the very few of you who will consider […]
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Don’t panic! Just draw more cartoons.
Don’t Panic. When I was a kid, I remember really enjoying The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was my kind of weird and short enough that kid me actually read the whole thing. In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted […]
You should build an audience, before you write your report.
Time for another report design mindset change. At the most basic level successful communication requires a sender, a message, and a receiver. You, as the report designer, are the sender. The report carries the message. So who is the receiver? For a lot of organizations the receiver is hypothetical. At least for those wishing to […]
Stop Creating Spork Reports
What is a spork report? I want you to imagine visiting a nice little cafe for a light lunch. You decide to order a simple salad and a cup of soup. When the meal shows up, what utensils will you use to eat your food? Easy, right? A fork for your salad and a spoon […]
How long does it take to read a report?
Page count is a somewhat useless measure. When I was young, every once and awhile a teacher would allow us to bring in a “cheat sheet” to use when taking a test. I would write in tiny script so that I could fit a ton on that single page. (sidenote: It was definitely a trick, […]
The 5 Stages of Wasted Data
So how do you waste data? I’ve decided to start the year by really digging into my own report design process. My hope is to eventually create a set of tools that can be used to help guide the review of an organization’s reporting strategy. Part of that review will be very user centric. But […]