What was getting in the way
An order arrives by email. It gets checked, priced and approved, then picked at a warehouse, despatched, delivered and invoiced. Each step lives somewhere different. The people who'd been there for years carried the map in their heads.New starters had a written procedure and a list of orders with a status column. A list tells you what state one order is in. It doesn't tell you what comes next, or where orders are piling up.
Why we went this way
A tube map answers one question very well: how do I get from here to there? An order's life is a route, so we drew it as one.Every status is a station. Lines branch and join only at stations, each line has its own colour, and arrows show the direction of travel. The number by a station is how many orders are sitting there. A red ring means one of them needs a person.It took five rounds. The second failed outright: it stacked three ways of reading the page on top of each other, and the reader had to learn all three. Every round after that took something away.
How well it worked
It went live on the real orders, and the counts on the map matched the list exactly. And we know that it's not just the new starters that use it monitor the order flow.Interestingly, we tried the same idea somewhere else, and it failed. We drew a software company's six product lines as a tube map. It looked clever...and helped nobody! We threw it away ourselves.The difference was the question. The order desk has one fixed question: where's my order? The product portfolio had none, so a reader had to work out what they were asking before the map could help.
What we'd do differently
The simplicity of this type of map reflects that it's only trying to answer one question. It's important to agree that question before drawing anything. If there isn't one, or more than one, then a tube map might be the wrong device.In terms of implementation, the information on the map should be super sparse. It needs to be navigatable at a glance. It's easy to have labels covering the lines, and taps going astray. Make sure you test every click.