9.3 Guidelines for Report and Output Design

Designing reports and output is a user-focused activity that typically followed a prototyping approach. When designing an output, there are several guidelines need to be considered during the activity. This sub topic will briefly explain the main guidelines.

9.3.1 Keeping the Reports Simple and Attractive

Printed reports and screen output should be attractive and easy to read and understand. Good reports design such as should consider the report header and footers, columns heading alignment, column spacing and field order. Every report should have a report header; which appears at the beginning of the report, identifies the report and contains report title, date and other necessary information. Report footer appears at the end of the report can include grand total of the numeric fields or any other end-report information. Other than that, every report should have page header. Page header appears at the top of the pages and includes column headings that identify the data. Column heading is a caption used referring to a column, and we should space the columns carefully. If the information listed in a report contains more than values, it's good if the detail lines is grouping based on a control field. Figure 9-5 shows how to represent a report layout. The report should be easy and simple. The presentation of the reports should be consistent with uniform formats.

9.3 Guidelines for Report and Output Design

9.3.2 Understanding the Reports Usage

The important principle in designing reports is to understand the report usage. Reports can be used for many purposes. In most cases, reports have been used to identify specific items as references in finding information; so it's needed to classify the items based on categories depending on users' need. This should be applied when designing a web-based or electronic report for information system. These types of reports planned to be read from beginning to the end and should be represented in one long scrollable page. If the report is used to find any specific information, it should be broken into multiple pages with a separate link. The frequency of report prepared also affected when designing a good reports; such as real time report and batch reports. Real time report is a report which provide data that are accurate and changes in a second or minute such as stock market data meanwhile batch reports contains historical information that may be in month, days and often provide additional information such as total, summaries and others.

9.3.3 Managing Information Load

Different levels of users need different categories of data with a different amount of data. Most managers need information but they prefer in graphical format, so it's easy for them to understand, summarize and make decision from the graphic. The goal of well-designed report is to provide all the information needed to support the task for which it was designed. This report shouldn't have all the information but only information required by certain users. Some reports display the most important information generally should be presented first in the top of the report. Other way we can use is by highlighting the most important information needed in the report.

9.3 Guidelines for Report and Output Design

9.3.4 Minimizing Bias

Whatever forms it takes, output is not only just a neutral product that is subsequently analyzed and acted upon by decision makers. Output will affects users in many different ways of how it's presented. Bias is present in everything that humans create. In Kendall et. a.l, 1999), there are three main ways in which presentation of output are unintentionally biased :

1.	How information is sorted
2.	Setting of acceptable limits
3.	Choice of graphics

How information is sorted
Bias is introduced by the way in which data are sorted. It's because when users read a report, those data appearing first in a list may receive more attention compared to those appearing later. Because of that most data are displayed in alphabetical order, chronological and cost. So, there is no bias.

Choice of graphics
Bias can occur in the selection of the graphic size, color, scale used and types of graphics. Graphic size must be proportional, so that the user is not biased as to the importance of the variables that are presented. Figure 9-6 shows an example of biased graph where the scale shown for number of students are fixed for 50 people per scale.