A Design Study of an Animated System for Representing Financial Ratios

Computer visualizations are all around us. In this paper we describe a design process in which we explore the development of a new visualization to aid managerial decision making. The ultimate goal of our design effort is to develop a visualization that allows for presenting most of the critical financial ratios used to describe a firm’s activity on a single computer display and dynamically. In doing so, we hope to enable managers to develop holistic and intuitive appreciations of such matters as how a business changes through time, how the flows of resources in healthy businesses differ from those in trouble, and how decisions about one aspect of a business affect others