This column focuses on the effort information workers expend to get the information they need to do their jobs, assuming they have access to the Internet through a Web browser and/or access to email through their desktop computers or wireless devices. How do you measure effort when it comes to accessing and retrieving information?
More than five years ago, the president and CEO of Information Builders, a business intelligence software vendor, first discussed what is often referred to as the "clicks paradigm." By using the clicks paradigm, you can determine the difficultly or ease of accessing information based on the number of clicks it takes with a mouse to retrieve it.
How many menu selections, pivots, drags and drops away is your information? The more users need to know how and where to click, the more difficult it is for them to find their information. Is it one click away? Two clicks? Three clicks? Actually it is possible for information to be zero clicks away. If an administrator walks up to a worker every day at 10 a.m. and hands them a report relevant to their day's work, then the information could be considered to be zero clicks away.
In today's world, however, things can be more automated than such a manual process. If you assume that every worker reads their email as part of their day's work, then information that is automatically emailed to a person daily, weekly, monthly or whenever can be said to be accessible with zero clicks worth of effort. In effect, the information has found the worker as opposed to the worker finding the information.
There you have it. When information is emailed to a worker, the worker has arrived at their destination - the information they need - with little or no effort. This is how we want an information architecture to work. It should be able to support 30 to 50 percent of requests for information. The challenge, of course, is to ensure that the information in the email is relevant to each person who receives it.
Figure 1: Zero Click Email Report
Both executives and managers prefer automated delivery of standard information because it saves them time (something they have in short supply). An alert can also be put on a piece of information so it is only sent if a condition is met, for example: let me know if inventory goes below a certain point.
The next level of effort in the clicks paradigm is one click. It takes a conscious effort to retrieve one-click information. A user, aware that they need information, goes and gets it rather than wait for it to be emailed to them.
For a one-click report, the user logs on to a system (probably Web based) through the company's corporate intranet. Then they navigate to the report they want and click on it to retrieve the current version.
It takes time and a good design team to build a system with a logon process and navigation that does not inhibit the information worker. It is always possible to create a system that understands the user's role and preferences so information can be tailored to their needs.
At the higher click environments, the concept of clicks is more a comparison than a literal number. For example, a two-click report is what is commonly termed a parameter-driven report. The user will have options for customizing the report before they actually run and retrieve it. They might select a date range for the report or a line of business or a location such as the region, country or state. A parameter-driven report can have any number of variables, so the number of clicks is actually determined by the number of values the user needs to set.
It is still referred to as a two-click report because the vast majority of the report has been completed by someone else, and the selections merely filter the data that will be retrieved for the report. So, in effect, it is very simple for the user to make the selections and get a valid, consistent report without doing a lot of work and without being a technologist.
Figure 2: A Parameter Form that Generates a Two-Click Report
Three-click reports are typically created by another class of users. Remember the analogy in my http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1041222 last column about the people who drive cars and the people who fix them? A three-click report is typically run by someone similar to the driver who has a moderate ability to fix their own car; a person who is a bit more technologically savvy than the standard non-technical user. About 12 to 15 percent of the users in most organizations fall into this category. Again if you remember the analogy, they don't necessarily like the three-click process. If there is an easier way to get information, they prefer it. An information architecture, however, has to provide advanced capability to a number of business users who can help to create new information for the environment.
The idea of a three-click report is to provide a simple tool for the user to manipulate the data in their report, to perform what-if type of analysis by trying various combinations of sorts, groupings and filters to see if a hypothesis can be proven or a trend uncovered.
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