Visualizing Data on Mobile Devices

Tweet

 

Being able to provide visual displays, such as graphs or charts, has always been a high-priority requirement for enterprise mobile users.  Recent advances by Webalo have provided new graphing and charting capabilities and features not available elsewhere.  Administrators can now configure what types of charts (e.g., pie, bar, line, and scatter), and what data sets, to display to mobile users … and administrators can do that right on their own their own mobile devices (any smart phone or tablet).  Once charts are configured the way administrators desire, they can then publish these configurations … again, from their own devices … which makes those charts immediately available to mobile users.

Charts can be connected to each other to provide a “drill down” capability.  For example, one might have a pie chart showing the how the various regions contribute to the overall company revenues.  Each slice in the pie represents a region and its revenue.  The mobile user can select a region in the pie and would then be presented with a second pie chart showing all the store revenues for that region.

Interestingly, a chart can really be a whole collection of charts.  For example, consider the pie chart showing how individual store revenues contribute to a region’s total revenue.  Each slice in the pie chart would represent one of the region’s stores.  But the chart isn’t available just for a single region … it’s available for all regions.  The mobile user can select any region and would then see the store revenues for that selected region.  So, there are really multiple charts available (a chart for each region).

Drilling down again, the data may also contain store information on this year’s revenue, last year’s revenue and projected revenues.  The administrator can create a bar chart comparing these metrics for all stores in a region and connect this chart as the drill down for the region-store pie chart.  A mobile user can select a store in the pie chart and view the store’s past, current, and projected revenues presented in a bar chart.

These charting capabilities have become a big hit among Webalo customers … so much so that customers have asked for the capability that charts be the primary view of the data (with data tables becoming a secondary view).  So when a mobile user views a report, the chart comes up first.  This feature is also in the new Webalo client release … available at all the app stores.  Go get it!