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All those questions can be answered with a number, and that single number has a lot of meaning for the right people. For example, a fictitious company usually gets 1000 users visiting their site but this morning when the web analyst checked their Website dashboard, she sees they got 25K visitors yesterday. Something happened and she immediately starts to do some analysis to understand why.
Our pretended analyst knew that something was out of the normal parameters because she knows her data inside out, but to assume that everyone reading a KPI will know what is going on, that is a heck of a risky business. In order to offer a better, more complete view of a KPI our object should always (when possible) include some context.
Let us review some of the options available as of now to include more information in our KPI
Applying Color
Color is very simple and straightforward; we will want at least two colors, one that indicates positive and another one that delivers the bad news. In my example anything above the daily average Users should go in a positive color.
Color will give us the most basic context; we would know now how the KPI is doing, but we would not know how well or poorly it is performing.
Including a second KPI
The most intuitive way to add context to a KPI in Qlik would be to add a second measure. Depending on the main KPI type then we can use different supportive measure, for our example we could compare today’s unique users against yesterday or maybe against the series average or median value.
With color and a second KPI, we not only would see the KPI state but also we will have an element of comparison.
Adding visual indicators
As previously discussed in this blog, a nice way to make information more visible and useful is to add visual elements to the KPI. This technique could help to reduce the time needed to process and understand the displayed information.
Visuals indicators can be added in different places in Qlik:
- In the expression that return the displayed measure =sum(Users) & ' ' & if( sum(Users) > avg(Users), '▲', '▼')
- Defined in the number formatting (for positive and negative numbers only) #,##0 ▲;-#,##0 ▼
- Even simpler, as a part of the conditional color picker tool
Highlighting the comparison
It is a good idea to reserve color only for the elements that need our attention, in our Users KPI example the absolute number of Users is important but is when we compare it against other value when it really shines, to make that clear to everyone we should keep color out of the main element and apply it to the comparison.
