Thanks to Andrea Wiggins, Data Analyst at Enlighten and University of Michigan School of Information Student, for taking (and posting) pictures of Emetrics. Here’s a link to her MSI page, but it doesn’t seem to like me very much.

Thanks Again Andrea!

No, I promise not to quote Shakespeare (anymore).

But Robbin Steif’s post got me thinking…’what’s the report equivalent of an E-Mail subject line?’

There’s not a clear analog (digilog?) but we can start with the report title. If the goal of a report is to get users to take action, we need to give them a reason to read down past the title. Because I’m a slave to things that come in threes (anyone who was at Emetrics and happens to remember my presentation knows that I boiled report design down to three over-arching rules) I’ve got three rules for report titles.

Clarity: First and foremost, our report titles need to be clear. That is, they need to effectively communicate the contents of the report to the user. If we were talking about Persuasion Marketing, we might say that we are providing that initial ’scent’ to users. Report titles that are obscure, misleading or rely on the user understanding our specialized language are going to generate that glazed-over look in the eye that we all dread.

Brevity: A variation of KISS - Keep It Short S—– A report title like “Conversion Key Performance Indicators for acisite.com from dd/mm/yy to dd/mm/yy” is very likely to make our users yawn before they’ve even started. Use as few words as possible, and with our first rule try to use common words wherever possible - you don’t really want to have to explain what “Acquisition Index” means scores of time (yes, I made that mistake once) do you?

Alacrity: (Did I get you all on that one?) Because we want our users to take action based on the information we give them in the reports, the title should have at least some feeling of a call to action. Nothing so crass as ‘Click Here’ but we want to engage our users from the very start.

Putting the three rules above to work on the example title (bad) above, something like:

• It’s clear - we know what site it’s about and we know that it is reporting (somehow) on the success (health) of the ACISITE.COM business.
• It’s also short and to the pont.
• I’d wager that anyone seeing a report with ‘Success Metrics’ in the title is at least going to have a mild interest in what’s ‘inside’.

Now all we have to do is make sure the report delivers on the promise made in its title…