PeripheralKnowledge

See: BetterKnowledge

Sometimes, having lots of data is like having lots of data. There is too much of it to make sense of. Sometimes the data should "get out of your face".

Find ways to show data or trends in visually simple ways, for instance, which search term on your SiteSearchEngine has "grown" the most this month? Do you know?


You may regularly get 400 searches a month for "peanut butter", but this month find, if you can show trend data, that "marmite" has grown 400%... althought it may still have only 100 searches a month. It really is worth knowing this stuff "peripherally" because with a small change to your navigation you can ensure that vistors to looking for what you've got find it.

It is best to display your peripheral data somewhere where people will see it out of the corner of their eye, for example, in a side-bar on an intranet, on a company blog or on the bottom of your emails.

It might be useful to think about showing trend data in terms of colour ranges so that people only need to see it "when it's gone red".