American football is somewhat of a visual spectacle. Whether you attend a game or watch it in a bar, you’ll be confronted with a myriad of screens that show you what’s going on with great precision. From the position of the players and current scores to forecasts and upcoming games: you’ll be flooded with visualized information.
That’s great, but it also comes with the risk of overkill: those who want to share everything will likely convey nothing. The human brain simply isn’t capable of processing this amount of data. So, let’s have a look at the dos and don’ts and see what it can teach us in the Visual Management realm!
Too much information: don’t create the fun fair feeling
You know that ‘fun fair feeling?’ Flickering lights make you blink, moving objects upset your balance, and shrieking people confuse your brain. You stagger your way through the place, trying to take it all in. But once you get home, you’re so visually bewildered that you can only recall what the candy tasted like.
Too much information is exactly that: too much information. Some sports bars want to share all game-related information during an American football match. The problem is, people will end up remembering none of it. They’ll feel lost in an ocean of data. So, being selective is key.
Filter, filter, filter: share relevant, actionable data
Some sports bars accept requests. For examples, customers can ask the bartender to put on a specific game or sports show. There are also bars that use certain screens to display the day’s sports highlights, which provides customers with an at-a-glance overview. This allows them to enjoy their drinks and snacks while watching the game.
It’s a great example filtering relevant data — information your target audience actually needs. This principle is also incredibly important in customer service environments. Here, you can lay a great foundation for your information sharing strategy by working with threshold values, such as the current queue. Agents should get to see deviations from these values.
Here’s why: agents, too, can only take in so much information at once — especially if they work remotely and only have one screen. In these cases, it’s crucial that you include essentials in the taskbar and build their one screen around (deviations from) threshold values. After all, that’s the actionable information they need to make independent, well-informed decisions!
Want to explore your Visual Management opportunities? Please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are happy to perform a Quick Scan and discuss your information sharing strategy.