a numbers game
I updated the business requirements document today and added a section on tracking and reporting. This is a section that I have not given much thought until today. I am lucky that the company for whom I work is a software company whose application has a tracking section. Their tracking is for marketing purposes rather than drill and test scores, but it gave me some ideas how to better organize the data for presentation.Still, as I thought through the prototypical numbers that would be presented, certain types of drilling and testing scenarios threw wrenches into what I thought would be clean and simple numbers. In particular, drilling scenarios where a user ran through a drill multiple times covering the same question multiple times posed a conundrum for how to calculate or present a user's numbers. Additionally, a single card with more than one cue side could potentially pose a question for each cue. In a German-English deck, there might be a card with the values "das Buch" and "the book". Each side could be presented as a cue. Each side could be expected as a response. The card could potentially pose two questions in a drill. How is that counted? How is it presented?
I had to think about it for a while, but I hit upon the idea of a tracking section which provided a list of drill/test sessions that had been run, providing basic information at that level to help identify the session - like the deck name, the drill/test name, the user, and the date/time it was started. Clicking on a session would provide the session's report with a header section that included the session's aggregate data and sub sections that provided detailed data specific to each iteration of the drill that the user ran. The header and the sub sections would have total numbers as well as numbers relative to unique instances of a question to help distinguish where questions might have been covered multiple times in a drill.
The numbers are sure to be confusing to users who may not understand the distinction between "total" counts vs. "unique" counts or why the distinction would be drawn, especially if their drills are relatively simple (only one cue per card) or they only allow one iteration per drill. I can't help users that refuse to read the online help (although I wish there were a way to force at least an attempt at it). I know tracking numbers for the marketing application I support are a constant source of confusion especially where users compare dynamic changing data with data that is static relative to a point in time. This might also be the case with tracking in Flip.
The presentation challenge also got me thinking about revamping the main interface to provide more convenient access to the common areas of the application (like tracking) by offering something similar to Microsoft Outlook's wonderbar. That's something to consider down the road.
Labels: business requirements, interface, reporting, tracking, updates
posted by bylaw @ 8:34 PM
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