Audio Overlays in your Business Dashboards
By Loren Abdulezer
Abstract
From time to time when you create a business dashboard, it might be helpful to include context sensitive help. One particularly engaging method is inserting a Flash animation file with audio overlays. The result is like listening to a live narrator who walks you through the dashboard, step by step. This article shows you how to accomplish this.
* Note: This exercise requires you download several components from the Xcelsius Best Practices website. Please follow this Link to access these files.
Fig. #1: External Flash files can be used to generate context sensitive help
Making Complex Dashboards More Effective
Business dashboards are excellent tools for conveying information. They are intuitive, interactive, and offer many interface components. But, just because they are easy and intuitive for you, the dashboard designer; does not mean they are immediately obvious for your target audience.
Moreover, as your dashboards become more complex, you increase the risk of losing your audience. A Flash animation file with audio overlays that plays just when the user needs help is a great way to sidestep this problem.
There are three steps involved in creating this kind of component:
- Creating your basic Dashboard
- Creating a Flash animation outside Crystal Xcelsius
- Importing the Flash animation and making it interact with the Dashboard
Step 1: Create your basic Dashboard
For the purposes of this example, I want you to work with a specific spreadsheet and dashboard. Please download the following files to your hard disk, create a New Folder on your desktop, and place the files into that folder.
To download the files, it might be necessary to right-mouse click the link and save the file to the New Folder you created on your hard disk. The exact details of how to do this may depend on your browser type and version.
Once you download the files, open the spreadsheet in Excel (see Figure 2).
Fig. #2: Spreadsheet that grabs data for use in Crystal Xcelsius
The spreadsheet looks at cell A5 to see whether it has an "A" or "B". Based on this value, the appropriate data is placed into the accompanying financial projection below. This technique is known as Context Switching.
The data in cells B7 through G24 are to appear in a Crystal Xcelsius Table Component. When a person clicks on a row in the dashboard table, the corresponding data is displayed on a chart (see Figure 3). To switch back and forth between the two scenarios, you simply click on the corresponding radio button.
Fig. #3: Table Component allows charting of any row of the retrieved data
Step 2: Create a Flash animation outside Crystal Xcelsius
Yet suppose you don't want to write a lengthy explanation of how this works? Unlike this relatively simple model, there might be a lot of things happening in your dashboard, and one more text box is just one too many. This is where our Flash animation file with audio overlays comes into play.
There are a number of products you can use to create Flash animations. The tool used and described here is Macromedia Captivate (a product of Adobe/Macromedia - see Figure 4).
Fig. #4: Capture Movies of your session
When you create a new movie, you are given options on how you want the movie created.
Position the red handlebars over the area you want to record (see Figure 6)
Fig. #5: Set recording positions and options
Simply press the Record button. Before recording, Captivate will ask you to speak into the microphone to adjust sound levels. Once you start recording, Captivate captures screen activity, mouse movements, and voice. At the end of the recorded session you can edit these elements and add captions (see Figure 7).
Fig. #6: Post recording editing session
Once you're done with editing, you can publish your recorded movie to a Flash file. This Flash file can then be directly incorporated into your dashboard. The Flash file in this example is called LayeringExample01SharedRadio.swf and can be downloaded at:
LayeringExample01SharedRadio.swf
Once again, be sure to place all your downloaded files into the New Folder you created on your desktop.
Step 3: Import the Flash animation and make it interact with the Dashboard
Open your XLF dashboard file in Crystal Xcelsius, select an Image Component from the components panel, and drag it onto the canvas. Link it to the LayeringExample01SharedRadio.swf file, but do not embed the file. The resulting file should look something like Figure 8.
Fig. #7: Imported SWF file
In the Image Component's properties set the Display Status Key to 0 (see Figure 9) and link Display Status to cell A4 (see Figure 10).
Fig. #8: Controlling visibility of the movie from the spreadsheet
Fig. #8: Linking to a toggle switch in the spreadsheet
Your next step is to toggle this help facility using, of course, a Crystal Xcelsius Toggle Button. In the General tab of the Toggle Button properties panel, set the Labels to appropriate values, and also set the Insert In to cell A4.
Notice that in the Article08AudioOverlay.xlf file that I have the chart disappear when the help facility is enabled, and vice versa.
To run the files from your hard disk, it is important to re-import the SWF movie created in step 2 so that file paths are properly mapped.
Closing Thoughts
Using Flash animation files with audio overlays is a unique and engaging technique that will assist your users as they navigate through the dashboard. While sometimes challenging to implement, the results are undeniably useful and engaging – with the added bonus of keeping your dashboard clear of additional clutter.
Loren Abdulezer, CEO, Evolving Technologies Corporation http://www.xcelsiusbestpractices.com
©2005 Evolving Technologies Corporation - all rights reserved.