How to make a GOOD reporting Interface

Question

Hi All,

I have a ton of associated data revolving around a school, students, teachers, classes, locations, etc etc

I am faced with a challenge put fourth by my client; they want to have reports on everything. This means they want the ability to cross reference data points every which way and i think i'm just short of writing a pretty query builder. :/

This stack question is aimed at soliciting opinions on how to structure a reporting interface beautifully.

Any suggestions, references, examples, jQ plugins etc would be amazing.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I find the Trac's query builder rather acceptable for what it is meant to do.

But most probably your clients don't want everything, they are just too lazy to think about what they want now. You could help them decide by analyzing the use cases together, and come up at least with a few kinds of queris with just a few parts customizable -- in the worst case -- or just a few canned queries they really need -- in the best.

Answer 2

You should probably schedule a meeting with your client to determine what they need to do. This does not mean having them speculate about how great it would be if your software could do everything, was ultra-flexible yet totally easy to use, etc... but sit down and find out what they are doing right now. I'm saying this because that "oh, I'd like to be able to cross-reference everything with everything else!" sounds a bit too familiar, and might end in an ugly case of inner-platform effect.

I've found that rapid paper prototyping with the client is a great way to explore possible ideas, as it shifts their attention away from "can you make this button yellow?" issues to The Big Picture, to let them make up their minds what they actually need. Plus, it's ridiculously inexpensive to do.

Apart from that, for inspiration, there are UI pattern languages that address handling potentially large amounts of interconnected data. What's great about these is that you will often be able to use these patterns to communicate ideas to your client, since a well-structured pattern language will guide a non-expert through domain-relevant design decisions in increasing detail.

Answer 3

First, I can only support the other voices: work out with the clients what they actually need. A good argument is "I can do, but it will cost you X thousand dollars, every user will need Y hours of training, and you'll need a $100.000K/year developer to maintain it."

(Unfortunately, most clients at that point prefer to pick the guy who says "yes, can do cheaper!")

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Only second, and only if the client says "yes we do need everything":

What works well is a list/grid view progressive filtering. Instead of buildign the SQL query, then running it, let the user directly work with the results: e.g. right clicking a cell, and selecting "limit to this value" could add a WHERE colN = <constant> constraint.

You can generate suggestions for columns from SELECT DISTINCT calls - if it returns less than, say, 20 values, you can offer checkboxes for a OR combination of possible values.

It would be interesting to discuss en elegant UI for the sea of remaining problems: OR'ed conditions across multiple columns, ordering by more than one column, grouping, ...