Aloha Smart Manager
Reports and the Role of Data Visualization
Role Product Designer, October 2022 - Present
Team 6 UX Designers, 1 UX Researcher, 10+ Product Managers & Product Owners, 50+ Developers
Background
Aloha Smart Manager (ASM) is NCR Voyix’s next generation restaurant management solution that includes administrative, inventory, labor, and sales tools to help a restaurant increase revenue and efficiency while reducing costs. My current role on this team is to design the sales and administrative experience for ASM that includes sales data and analytics tools to provide reports and predictive analysis, general accounts management, and cash flow management to give our customers the ability to use industry-leading insights to make data-based decisions.
Sales Reports and Data Visualization
If a restaurant wants to increase profits, a manager might want to review the restaurant’s profits and losses in order to see what areas of the business can be improved to boost revenue:
But what do all these numbers mean? And what actions must this manager make in order to reach their goals? Research shows that humans are highly visual creatures and rely heavily on visual cues for adaptive behavior. When it comes to substantial quantities of data, data visualization plays an incredibly important role in analyzing complex data, identifying patterns and extracting insights for better decision making. In other words, illustrations, pie charts and line graphs make it easier for the human brain to understand massive amounts of data that enable people to gain actionable insights as a part of the decision-making process.
Customer interviews were conducted in order to determine which of these profit and loss values restaurant managers looked at the most and learned that prime cost was the most important data point and this value was often compared to a value from an earlier date.
But the prime cost value itself isn’t very informative, a manager will want to know in detail what values make up this cost in order to measure the restaurant’s current performance and narrow down any areas of the restaurant that might need immediate attention or improvement. So, how do we organize the raw data to do this?
Highlight Important Data Points
As the prime cost is the most important value for a manager, a line graph comparing the current year to the last year is given visual prominence at the top of the page so that managers can evaluate their restaurant’s year-long performance at a glance.
The line graph is followed by a calculation card to enable the manager to see the breakdown of the prime cost at a high level and also gives insight as to how that value performed against the same dates of the last year. Notice that both these visualizations also have the least amount of text as compared to the data table.
Organize Data into a Table
To help users digest the raw data in easier chunks, the data is organized into a table with the most important calculated values—gross profit, controllable income, restaurant operating income and income before income taxes—with greater font weight, size and given a gray background. This enables users to visually focus on those values and, by expanding or collapsing rows, can reduce unnecessary information and reduce cognitive overload.
Show Calculation Formulas
Users can also hover over the information icon to the right of those four titles to view the formula used to calculate the values.
Show Comparison Points
Users can compare the date of two different dates, and since user interviews revealed that the most compared dates were the current fiscal week to the fiscal year to date, the table defaults to these comparison points.
Users can change these dates by using the filter bar at the top of the page.
Results & Takeaways
Visual hierarchy is key. Creating reports that are visually appealing and easy to understand is important, but organizing that information from the most to least important can be profoundly impactful: the line graph at the top to give a summary of the current performance compared to the last year, a breakdown of the most important data point (the prime cost), and then all the other details of the profits and losses given in the table at the bottom.
Customers must be able to make quick decisions based on the data in your reports. Scanning raw data is tedious work, and customers don’t just want a product that merely organizes their data, they want it to be organized in such a way that one quick glance effectively identifies patterns, trends and outliers.