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www.beyeresearch.com — Registration Required.
BeyeResearch has a white paper on usability in business intelligence tools.
Keep in mind that the author is NOT a usability expert in the same vein as a Jakob Neilsen or Donald Norman, but you might find something interesting there. I didn't find anything more than common sense stuff.
The main problem with enterprise software developers is that they spend more time on completing feature checklists instead of pursuing feature excellence, which in itself includes usability. Most of the developers in BI probably don't even eat their own dogfood in that they aren't really using the crappy software they develop.
Anyways, check it out.
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On further reading, the paper reads like the type of empty advertorial you'd expect from a Gartner type of analysis.
When you in essence ask the vendors to provide usability case studies, you're going to get a highly skewed perspective in favor of the vendor.
No bar has been set in terms of what is good usability, and the applications aren't evaluated against this bar. You can ask two people how usable Product A is, and get two different responses, because they have different standards of usability that are not necessarily linked to demographic information.
Growing accustomed to working fast with a garbage user interface may create a type of tolerance or false sense of usability (anyone who uses Cognos can attest to this). The bottom line is that the paper would have been better served with some contribution by someone with expertise in the field of usability.
On a side note, there's a notable absence of open source solutions as well, other than the mention that Indicee uses Mondrian in the back end.