Wahrnehmungsoptimiertes Reporting - EyeTracking

Information is an important source for management decisions. Reports in all sorts and forms, from traditional print to mobile online visualisations are the primary source of information for managers. Up to now no empirically confirmed guidelines exist as far as the design of these reports, charts and tables are concerned. The most common problems when reading such reports and interpreting the numbers are perceptual anomalies and information overload. Subsequently, this effect might lead to a wrong assessment of a company’s economic situation and, furthermore, may give rise to wrong decisions being made by the company’s management. As a consequence, managers are quite dissatisfied with currently available management reports. The objective of this project is the development of an effective and perception-wise optimized design of management reports, webpages and information cockpits. The project results in underlying design recommendations for annual and management reports based on experimental tests, empirical research and statistical calculation methods.

To achieve these objectives, the research team works interdisciplinary (economics, information technology, psychology) and in cooperation with leading auditing companies and the IT-industry. A special offer to companies is a high-tech test stand for management reports of all sorts, implemented directly at the university with the latest eye-tracking equipment, where companies can have their reports tested for compliance with the recommendations based on the research activities.