What makes a Guru? Is it a person that already knows everything on a subject?
I believe it is someone who knows that they do not know everything and is still willing to explore and discover. As I have learned. We’re all quite used to using the RAG / Red Yellow Green / Traffic light approach to performance, but what happens when that fails?
A few years back I was part of a 3 man team involved in a Dashboard development for the Executive Committee of a mine in southern Africa. I was wise in the ways of visualising data, I knew Xcelsius inside out, I could deliver anything they asked for and more. I spent long hours designing and developing numerous different dashboards, from Strategy Scorecards to SHE reports. The main dashboard was the Scorecard and all other dashboards would be accessible from it. The Project Champion (member of Exco) was thrilled with what we delivered, he then presented to the rest of the Exco team…
They loved it, but there was a major issue. 2 Members couldn’t see the KPI performance clearly… Wait what? Our scope was to build the dashboard with large text so the old guys in the back could follow… We couldn’t understand, what had we done wrong? He then continued to explain why, as he himself only just discovered the reason. 2 Members of the 8 man Exco team was colour blind.
This was the first time in my Dashboard Development career that I had come across this particular hurdle. As it turns out, colour blindness is more common than I originally thought, and it’s not as the myth goes, only men that are colour blind.
Visit the Colour Scheme Generator and use the Vision Simulation to see how colour blind people see different colours.
So now we were faced with an interesting problem, since performance is generally displayed as Green – Good / Red – Bad. We needed to come up with a solution and re-present the next day. I thought about it, and the solution was quite simple. We would introduce different shapes along with the performance colours.
As we were using a XY Chart (No Scorecard component back in those days, you whipper snappers have it easy) to show the performance all we needed to do was create a copy and change the shapes, slap in a toggle and Bob’s your uncle.
After presenting the revised Scorecard to the Exco team everyone was happy. This was an interesting lesson to learn and one that I have carried with me for the last couple of years. It has served me well.
My advice to you as my fellow Xcelsius developers is as follows; In the design session with your client raise the subject of colour blindness with relation to performance colours and address the problem before it becomes a problem.
Further more, head over to colour-blindness.com and take the fun Ishihara Test for Color Blindness and the Color Arrangement Test.
Please share your experiences by leaving a comment…
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