The Reporting Virtuoso

I've been reading Gary Angel's recent postings about the foibles of analysis and report writing. I wanted to share my thoughts, based on my experiences with deliverables.

I'm not going to stand up on Mount Olympus and lecture about report preparation, but I believe that we shouldn't be afraid to bring the practice of A/B testing to bear on our client deliverables. Especially when it comes to custom reporting. Devise a prototype, test it out on your client, but always be agile and flexible, keeping one or two other templates in reserve if your first attempt falls flat. Report crafting isn’t all that different from sculpting or any other art: you have to know your patron and know what he or she wants to see delivered.

Not just the basket of KPIs, but also visualizations and aesthetics. Senior decision makers, for all their gravitas and professional veneer, are just as finicky as kids in an ice-cream shop, trying to pick between two-hundred flavors. Never underestimate the fact that rendering data in a presentable format can often be an exercise in catering to highly subjective tastes.

We know that there are strict (or, at least, not completely malleable) rules governing things like unique visitor counts, impressions, and the statistical validity of month-over-month sampling changes. But are there rules for which reports look pretty and which reports are packaged to have upward mobility?

It's the Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of all web insight vendors. It's more of an issue for us than for in-house analysts, because at least they have some exposure to their bosses' tastes. We're basically going in blind. We've all got horror stories. I've seen my work poked apart in board rooms when I went graph-heavy for a client whose corporate culture was hard-wired to think in terms of stolid, Spartan-like data tables. On the flip side, I've been caught going data-heavy for clients who were expecting to see one or two clean, pristine metrics they could hand up to C-level bosses.

If you push out the most glamorous, multi-layered metrics, crammed one on top of the other in sumptuous dashboards, when all your client wants is a dry, bare-bones trend line showing peaks and valleys over the last quarter, then as a vendor, you're screwed. The key is to find out upfront not just what data the client wants you to pump out, but what their tastes are. Are they cut-and-dry numbers folk, or do they crave sexy graphs with rainbow color palettes?

It pays to know, and if you do, you'll have earned your $86,683 per year.