Data visualization challenge: the objective

This is the second part of designing my dashboard for the viz challenge at Chandoo.com. With the raw data ready to tell a story, it was time to understand what the objective was. Unfortunately many dashboards/data displays are so immersed in either the technology or the ability to create pretty things (3D pie charts and revving gauges) that this most important part is overlooked. From the challenge our mission was to:

"help a senior manager understand how the sales people have done in the 24 months"

There are three keys here to achieving the goal: senior - someone high up in the company who has little time to be delving into information - they want the information fast and they want to know what caused the issues they are seeing.

Sales people - they want to know about the performance of the sales people - all of the measures and charts should be centric to these sales people, or at least explain the performance of these sales people.The very first measures shown should describe the sales performance alone.

24 months - he/she is clearly interested in the time trending information - how the sales people have performed over the two year period.

Now in most situations, an objective is rarely as well defined as that - it is the job of the product owners to ensure clarity like this is reached. Is this a one-off? Who will be using it? What do they care about in this instance? How timely does the data need to be? From there you can move to the measures displayed..