The final descent into Salt Lake City was dark and bumpy. The snow had subsided for the time being but rocked the plane, as if making an attempt to remind us that it was still there, merely taking a break.
The only reason I decided to take this flight, instead of traveling with my companions, was to be available for a highly stressful meeting regarding OLAP and the co-mingling of an external data source with our native data warehouse.
And while I spent hours - nay, days, preparing for creating a conceptual flow of dimensions and measures, and my demo partner equally worked at diagrams and custom SSIS packages, it was during the demo itself that I came to one realization:
It is the rare occasion that someone cares how this stuff works. It is much more common that people care about how it looks.
Although the ETL refresh and overlay of data were certainly captivating in their own right, I realize that those who want to see it work are those who haven't seen the end product. What this means is: Show them a screen that looks like what they want, and they don't care how it got there.
Full disclosure: I actually discovered this a couple of months ago when I built a custom view for a meeting that didn't actually calculate anything; rather it simply transformed data into a different data element type, to better mimic what the client had described. Simply mocking up a view was all it took to allay concerns. However, today, in actually performing a detailed "How does it" demonstration, I was very aware that we only had to do this because no proof of concept screen had been available.
Here's a better example: I don't care gas-efficient the Chevy Cobalt I'm renting is; all I can think about is how hideous a canary-yellow car is! I'm hung up on the presentation layer when I should be thinking about gas cost or suitability for driving in snow! Oh, how heavy the burden of pre-disposed preference can be! But really, who in their right mind would be pre-disposed to like this color? Who told Chevy that this color was a good choice for a vehicle? A CLOWN?
In all seriousness, it is this that these two situations, today's meeting and my rental of a heinously painted automobile that has brought me to truly understand that first impressions are so important. Not rocket science, I know. However, knowing this should remind us to prepare for each important interaction - to think about and specifically design each first impression (well, at least in business).
Click here to see the atrocity that was my rental.
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