The winter off-season can’t end soon enough, although there are several car upgrades I aim to do, budget permitting (race seats & harness most likely although then I’m out of SCCA stock category but I plan to autocross with PCA principally due to time constraints).

I thought to share this artifact from a recent Devise project in the area of reporting solutions. I developed three goal evaluation scales to be used alongside various financial & operational metrics in dashboard-type web application contexts. The defined goal evaluation scales 1-3 emphasize display of the star symbol to reward on-goal metrics. The middle zone of an “OK” metric having no icon is preferable to reduce visual noise onscreen, although scale 3 provides for a specific warning state icon if the metric is a very important one and even small trends off-goal need to be addressed with action.

There was internal team discussion of the last goal evaluation scale labeled “do not use”. This scale reduces the happy occurrence of the star symbol; also, since it directly conflicts with the chosen default scale 1 it had to be explicitly banned from use in the system. If visual noise was the primary consideration for the selection of goal evaluation scales, the “do not use” scale would have more merit as it highlights only the more-unusual states of being off-goal and above goal. What do folks think?