Red-Amber-Green spotlights and gauges are very familiar due to the fact that everybody drives cars.
Reminder : to setup RAG alerts/color-coding in BeGraphic gauges, you have to tickmark the "Enable advanced mode" at the bottom of the gauge window
(see the picture below & look for the yellow circle)
Contrary to what some people think, a gauge shows much more than one value. It gives the minimum, the maximum, the current value and above all
at lightning speed how far from the maximum you are (in milliseconds, without deciphering figures).
Here are some examples : http://www.begraphic.com/gauges-and-meters.html
I have two pieces of advice:
- only use gauges for indicators that have a maximum and a minimum (mainly engines with known capacity have these two limits)
Caution : a company can't make more operating profit than its revenues (= maximum value); but its losses can be unlimited (no minimum value !!!) - add alerts (RAG indicators) to force report readers to become aware decision-makers (e.g.: beyond this speed limit, the driver knows that he might be fined)
And don't forget that a gauge can also be flat/linear... Then it might be called:
- thermometer (if you are a doctor)
- "Bullet chart" (or "strip chart" if you are a sparklines fan)
- "cursor" (if you are focused on data visualization)
- "dot plot" (if you are a statistician who like William S. Cleveland's researchs)
- carnival hammer (if you like fun house)
If you need more gauge examples, think about chart recorders (recording onto strip charts or circular charts). They are nothing more than mechanical gauges tracing a time series. You might know them as Barograph, Electrocardiograph (Pressure Indicator and Recorder), Polygraph (ancestor of LPs), Seismograph, Thermo-hygrograph...
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