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example

This represents a category of job times, which are broken down into timeframes. Timeframes have:

Total (if fake is 0, shown without T, else with)
Fake (hidden if zero) as F
Built as B
Scheduled as S
Jobs as Jobs
Buffer as Buffer
Techs as Techs
Contractors as Contractors

The business owners want it all there per timeframe explicitly as I've tried to hide some of it in tooltips before and the suggestion was declined.

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  • Can you elaborate/clarify a bit, the logic you describe is confusing? Sep 26, 2013 at 21:48
  • Sure. The bar at the top that goes from 8 to 19:00 is the min and max times of the category. The earliest timeframe starts at 8am and the latest timeframe ends at 5pm. Each timeframe within a category has the following information that needs to be explicitly displayed: Total, Fake, Built, Scheduled, Buffer, Job Count, Tech Count and Contractor Count. All of those are just counts essentially. Its a ton of information, especially given that this screen generally has multiple categories all displayed at once, each with multiple timeframes.
    – CGross
    Sep 26, 2013 at 22:02
  • What value are you getting by placing it into a horizontal time view?
    – DA01
    Sep 26, 2013 at 22:12
  • Being able to, at a glance, compare timeframes that are that exact or similar times across multiple categories.
    – CGross
    Sep 26, 2013 at 22:18

1 Answer 1

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Some suggestions to cope with information overload are:

  • Be flexible: provide both short and extended versions of information:
    enter image description here
  • Make accent on non-zero values for quick visual detection
  • Support visual analysis with background, i.e. zebra-colors, etc. See picture: enter image description here

  • Provide search by example: let the system automatically find exact and similar timeframes based on your selection, see picture above

  • Provide detailed comparision for selected processes based on quantitative data:
    enter image description here

Also keep in mind, the visual comparision is good for quick and dirty qualitative analysis. So the last point on quantitative comparision could be very useful.

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  • Thank you, this is great advice. What program did you use to create these examples?
    – CGross
    Sep 27, 2013 at 18:18
  • @CGross I use Xara Designer. Sep 28, 2013 at 6:07

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