Henkel : Charting success

A dream tool for analysts needs to awaken them to key features.

The Site

Henkel, a Germany based laundry to adhesives products group, provides analysts with a useful tool for interrogating and capturing performance data in reports.

Henkel provides a universal set of Service tools in its online Sustainability report that includes an ‘Interactive key figures chart generator’. The default display on opening is for a three-year bar chart for production volumes in metric tons, but five control options around the edges of the display allow changes to the featured content and its capture in various ways.

At top left are three graphic buttons for selecting the view: table, bar chart, line chart. The current selection is highlighted in red. Below the display area are two mouse-over menus for Years (any or all from 2006-2010) and Key Figures (eight main categories with expandable sub-menus). A control at bottom right allows the x axis to be switched between years and figures. At top right are a mouse-over Legend button that reveals the key to the years or figures (which are colour-coded on charts but only labelled on the x axis) and three data capture options: Excel sheet download, image export (as a png file) and print. The tool is Flash-driven and powered by Nexxar.

The Takeaway

There are features in Henkel’s chart generator which analysts’ dreams are made on (whether investors or corporate responsibility professionals): a five-year data span, the underlying numbers available in a format, Excel, they can import into their own systems and – rarely glimpsed – an export image option to help populate presentations. But whether the dream will be realised depends on how awake they are to the richness of the control options, especially given how unusual and therefore unexpected they are. In this respect, Henkel could do more to point up the charting features.

The chart generator definitely looks underwhelming and at first glance does not appear to do much. The positioning of the menus below the display and the scattering of controls contribute to the impression. The requirement to mouse-over to reveal the legend is not intuitive – the conventional wisdom on graphs is that it is visible – while the reliance on mouse-over captioning of the display and capture buttons is a weakness in that it places an over-reliance on the graphic in elements that may be unfamiliar (export image or switch axis, for example). Overall, the grey colouring of the controls allied to their small size and scattering contributes to their getting somewhat lost in a page where the use of white space to give a clean view is overdone.

First published on 21 April, 2011