Statistician Reporting Application: Data Visualization in Macromedia Flash MX 2004

Data Visualization Strategy: The Statistician Reporting Application

In evaluating all of these challenges, we were forced to come up with a single solution that not only provided us what we needed but was expandable for the future. Our design needed to use each of the principles listed in this article. This ensured that as our customer base was ever-expanding, our application would be able to not only present the data to users in an engaging and intuitive manner but evolve as the reporting needs changed going forward.

So, how did we go about meeting those goals? Lots of planning, structuring, applying user feedback, QA, and then restructuring some more. Ultimately the way the target audience interacted with the application drove many factors for how we designed and developed it. The intended audience for the Statistician Reporting Application is product managers, marketing managers, and those involved in marketing. These are people who are very interested in seeing which features and functions their potential customers are interested in learning about. This audience is often trying to quickly pull business conclusions from the reported numbers on deadline, so the reporting application needed to be designed with this in mind.

Architecture

It is vital when designing for data visualization that the application is able to be viewed consistently among various operating systems, platforms, and browsers.

Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional

To work through all of the challenges, we needed an application that could build an architecture that provided us enough reliability, consistency, and extensibility. Macromedia Flash was a no-brainer. The fact of having the application look exactly the same on nearly all operating systems, platforms, and browsers immediately put it on top. Superior browser penetration for the plug-in makes Flash the ideal choice.

Macromedia Flash Remoting

Flash Remoting provides an excellent communication protocol to link the reporting application to an ever-expanding database. Flash Remoting can do this while retaining flexibility for extending the actual reporting application as the need requires. It allows the database and the reporting application to be two completely separate systems - allowing for flexibility as each system expands. In addition, because it provides a solid system for loading data and presenting data loading status visually to the user, the Flash/Flash Remoting combination became the ideal choice.

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