The Five Big Fat Lies of Web Analytics (5/5) - Looks don't matter!

He has a lot to say.

But he's not too easy on the eyes.

Could those sentiments apply to your latest report or dashboard?

Ugh.

The truth is that most reports are ugly enough to make your eyes bleed. That might be perfect for Halloween but not so cute when you're trying to extract meaning from a bunch of tables and graphs. 

This is because many reports are produced by report-monkeys or are automated. The goal may be to show you how much data they have access to. 

Dense, cluttered, unnecessarily granular. 

Yuck.

Of course, the underlying data need to be remorselessly reliable but that's what appendices are for. Marketers need digestible insights they can act on - we call them action nuggets - not data tables and pie charts. Definitely not the traditional pie charts, even if they are exploding and especially even if they are 3-D. Tufte would turn in his grave. Especially if he were dead.

Information design is as important as the data you're trying to digest, if the recipient is to have any chance of applying the insights.

There, we said it.

State of the art APIs won't give you insight.

Great judgement and analysis from humans who understand your business and can express themselves visually will.

Want more Lies?
Check it:
1. It's all about web traffic
2. Apples vs. Oranges
3. You need....
4. Dashboard's live; our work is done