A Guide to DORA

Design Once Run Anywhere

Avoiding the Screen Size Dilemma
Applying Responsive Design to Business Analytics Applications

www.arcplan.com

Contents
Executive Summary ........................................................................................................................2
Profiting from the Mobile Revolution ................................................................................................3
Empowering All Users on All Devices ..............................................................................................3
The Screen Size Dilemma...............................................................................................................4
Responsive Design & DORA ...........................................................................................................5
Why DORA? ...................................................................................................................................5
Future-Proof Standards for DORA ...................................................................................................6
Minimized Risk Higher Adoption ...................................................................................................6
arcplans DORA Advantage.............................................................................................................7
DORA for Existing arcplan Applications ...........................................................................................7
Designing Responsively Advice for BI App Developers ................................................................8
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................10
About arcplan................................................................................................................................11

Executive Summary
What is DORA? It means Design Once, Run Anywhere, and its the new mantra for solving
todays screen size dilemma something all organizations are facing as they struggle to
develop applications that are easily portable from desktops to smartphones and tablets. With a
constantly growing variety of computing devices, IT departments, developers and BI Competence
Centers are fighting fires to provide adaptive, yet usable and easy to maintain business
intelligence, analysis, and planning applications for all devices.
As mobile devices become the primary way of accessing business analyses, DORA will become
the standard development paradigm due to faster implementation and maintenance cycles. This
guide explores DORA, its foundation in Responsive Design and HTML5, how it will influence
business intelligence (BI) design going forward, and how arcplan is pioneering the concept with its
latest release, arcplan 8.

arcplan | A Guide to DORA | 2

Profiting from the Mobile Revolution

Conditions are finally right for mobile BI to take off: affordable, high-performance devices are in
the hands of nearly 50% of the population and technology has advanced far enough that mobile
BI is not just a possibility but an inevitability. Already, Gartner has found that after e-mail, BI is the
most popular application with CEOs and CFOs, and that use cases are building among middle
managers and line managers who need to make quick decisions while away from their desks.
But what has been the roadblock for mobile BI becoming a reality at most companies? Certainly
not the license fees they are often very affordable or even free from some BI vendors. Not the
desire survey after survey has reported that mobile BI is important for businesses of all sizes
and in all industries and that plans have been underway for some time, with its deployment
always around the corner. A big contributor to the delay is logistical in nature the laborious
process of designing and maintaining applications for multiple end user devices.

Empowering All Users on All Devices

The reality is that for decades, business intelligence applications have been designed for desktop
PC or laptop use. It has taken some time to develop mobile design standards, but now that the
iPhone is 6 years old and the Google Play Store hosts one million apps, its time for mobile BI to
arrive. But how do you
deploy one analytical application to all devices?
adjust one design to many different screen sizes?
keep design and maintenance effort low?
The answer is DORA Design Once, Run Anywhere a design philosophy pioneered by
arcplan, the global business intelligence leader who was one of the first BI vendors to release a
(free) mobile BI framework and has since become a proponent of Web apps as the dominant
mobile BI deployment method. Web apps are not reliant on any particular mobile platform (iOS,
Android, etc.) but instead run on any device in a browser. DORA uses Responsive Design
principles to take BI apps beyond the desktop, saving 60% or more on development time and
costs. Responsive Design enables websites to dynamically adjust their layout to the end users
screen size, resolution and orientation. It is the ultimate solution for cross-device optimization.
The concept of DORA takes Responsive Design to BI dashboards, scorecards and reports.
As half of the worlds businesses are expected to embrace the bring-your-own device (BYOD)
trend by 2017 and more than 80% of employees are already using personal devices in the
workplace, DORA is more necessary than ever. This guide explores the what, why and how of
DORA as well as practical ways to employ it now to design responsive, adaptive BI applications
for any mobile device.

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The Screen Size Dilemma

Ask any website, application, or BI developer their biggest
challenge and theyll say its designing for a multitude of
mobile devices. It has always been a struggle for BI app
designers to optimize applications to fit the different sizes of
desktop PCs and laptops, ranging from 13-24, but the
challenge became even greater once mobile devices
became so ubiquitous in the workplace.
Tablets will surpass laptop and PC sales in 2013 and it
seems that every executive has one with them at all times.
From a design perspective, the explosion of the sub-8-inch
tablet market (with models like Amazons Kindle Fire and
Googles Nexus 7) has further complicated app design, with
screen sizes between the iPads 9.7 inch screen and the
iPhones 4 inch screen needing to be incorporated into the
mix. While size is just one point of contention, there are
other factors in play. For example, orientation which
devices are optimized for portrait or landscape orientation
and pixel density or pixels per inch (PPI). The iPhone 5s
Retina Display is able to display more pixels on its 4 inch
display than most laptops. A BI dashboard that looks great
on an iPhone, with its 326 ppi, looks significantly different
blown up on a Surface with its 148 ppi.
For BI app designers, it is impossible to create separate
reports and dashboards for every device, especially where
BYOD is allowed. From a maintenance point of view alone,
it would be a nightmare. So what is the solution? A new and
intelligent approach that allows designers to create one app
that dynamically adjusts its layout for all devices, from
laptops to smartphones.

Native vs. Web Apps

The debate over whether native apps or Web apps
are the future of mobile BI still rages, but
proponents of Responsive Design favor Web apps.
While native apps from vendors like MicroStrategy
and Oracle take advantage of the native gestures of
a particular device, Web apps from a vendor like
arcplan are device-independent and can be rolled
out on multiple platforms with little effort using
DORA.
To determine which software strategy is best for
your company, ask yourself:

Do we have multiple platforms and device

types in use already?

Will we ever possibly deploy other devices to

our users?

Are users allowed to use their own devices for

work purposes?

If the answer is yes to any of the above, a Web app

deployment is best. Web apps:

Dont force users to download updates

because a fix on the server is a fix on the site
serving the app.

Enable users to bookmark or even save an

icon on the devices desktop to open the app
in a browser window. This way, it feels more
like an app, not just a website.

Are starting to integrate native gestures thanks

to HTML5 (more on this below).

4
326 ppi

4,7
320 ppi

5
441 ppi

7
254 ppi

7,9
163 ppi

9,7
265 ppi

10,6
148 ppi

13-24
100-232 ppi

iPhone 5

Nexus 4

Galaxy 4S

Kindle Fire

iPad Mini

iPad

Surface

Laptops & Desktops

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Responsive Design & DORA

Responsive Design is a concept developed for Web design.
The idea is to present the same content regardless of the
device type, but the layout responds to the device asking
for the content. In the BI world, it means a master app can
be designed one time, then slightly reconfigured for each
device with very little effort no copy /no separate app. This
is what we mean by DORA Design Once, Run Anywhere.
The goal is to have a matching look and usability for each
device. But with DORA, the effort required to design BI
applications for multiple devices can be reduced by 70% or
even more.

Benefits of Responsive Design/DORA

Time savings As much as 70% during

development.

Content reuse Its easy to reuse existing

desktop BI content. Simply tweak the design
and it can be served up on multiple devices
with very little effort.

BYOD support DORA is tailor-made to

support BYOD policies without any extra
burden on IT or BI teams.

Why DORA?
The question is more like why not DORA? Design Once, Run Anywhere apps are necessary in a
world where organizations need the same apps deployed to devices with different screen sizes
while maintaining a consistent design and low maintenance effort.
There are a multitude of reasons why BI apps need to be designed differently for different
devices. Phone screens of 4-5 inches are too small for
advanced charting and dashboards that look great and work
well on tablets. In the same vein, analytical applications
designed for larger screens need to be divided into smaller
columns that smartphones can display properly. For
example, a dashboard with six charts can be digested easily
on a 19 monitor, but on a smartphone, a user can literally
only read one chart at a time the numbers and labels are
simply too small otherwise. Using DORA, the app designer
can slightly modify the desktop app for smartphones by
stacking each chart on top of each other, requiring the phone
user to only scroll down to view the same content. No need to
pinch or zoom the content would be optimized for the
screen size without the user having to do a thing. The app understands which variation to present.

DORA also understands how to present content properly when the user flips
between portrait and landscape orientation.

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Future-Proof Standards for DORA

arcplans DORA principle is based on globally accepted standards such as HTML5. Its the next
major revision of the HTML standard, the markup language for presenting content on the Web. At
this point, all major browsers Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer support
HTML5 enhancements. What is important to note is that HTML5 makes multimedia and graphics
content easier to handle on any device. This is a huge opportunity for BI vendors like arcplan,
who have moved to an HTML5 client rather than continuing to rely on Java, Silverlight, Flash or
other older Web technologies. Needless to say, the users experience with websites and BI apps
is better and faster with HTML5 because of its reduced reliance on plugins (which are handled
differently in each browser). HTML5 ensures that all content is served up the same way,
regardless of browser or device. This is the backbone of Responsive Design and DORA.
Organizations that choose to deploy their mobile BI apps as Web apps which arcplan advocates
will be able to take advantage of HTML5. Native apps require application and infrastructure
customizations for every device type, which makes them cumbersome to maintain over time for
both vendors and end users. HTML5 basically eradicates the arguments for native apps. HTML5
browsers also access touch information, enabling Web apps to behave just like native apps, and
in the near future such modern browsers will also access sensor information and other devicespecific features to lessen the difference even more. There is no need to use plugins like Flash in
order to view multimedia content on desktops, like animated BI charts, which is important
considering iPhones and iPads still do not support Flash.
How does your BI application understand where the app runs? In simple terms, arcplans DORA
BI apps use a media query approach to determine the size of the device they are being served
to. With a piece of JavaScript code arcplan detects the breakpoints for various screen widths and
orientations, which developers can make use of by defining a set of deployment templates
arcplan calls them Views to serve the various devices in the companys device support
strategy.

Minimized Risk Higher Adoption

The DORA principle minimizes many of the risks associated with continuous innovations among
devices and their evolving capabilities. With arcplans platform, IT leaders can ensure that they
only need to develop their BI apps once, and can deploy them seamlessly to a wide range of
devices including smartphones and tablets. They can also support kiosks and Web browsers as
well.
This offers significant cost and time savings for developers and more flexibility for users. It means
offering users the best experience no matter what device they use, ultimately leading to greater BI
adoption and more informed decisions across the enterprise.

arcplan | A Guide to DORA | 6

arcplans DORA Advantage

arcplan 8 was created with Responsive Design, or what
we call DORA (Design Once, Run Anywhere), in mind. It
is the first business intelligence platform to intrinsically
optimize BI apps for every device type.
arcplan utilizes an HTML5 client and matching
application development tools in its arcplan Application
Designer environment to adapt applications in less time
and at less cost than other BI platforms. The result is a
lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for customers than
building separate experiences for desktop, tablets, and
smartphones, amounting to a 70% savings on
development time. For example, for organizations
needing to support tablet and smartphones in addition to
desktop computers, arcplan 8 cuts BI application
development down 2/3 of that of competitors. This is
because with arcplan, there is only a small amount of
overhead for each device type the developer does not
need to design several apps from scratch for each device. This equates to faster deployments
and simpler application maintenance.

DORA cuts down development time significantly

while optimizing BI apps for multiple devices.

DORA for Existing arcplan Applications

How can you take advantage of arcplan 8 and Responsive Design for a BI deployment strategy?
Simply put, any arcplan application can be made responsive with a bit of effort. As with any GUI,
good design cannot be auto-generated by software or an algorithm. It would be too difficult for a
machine to determine what parts of your app belong together what parts are headers, labels, or
filters and should be shown on a certain device or not. arcplan provides a set of design bestpractices but also recommends an Application Design Revision Workshop with arcplans
Professional Services team if your application was designed some years ago.

arcplan | A Guide to DORA | 7

Designing Responsively
Advice for BI App Developers

The 5 Principles of DORA

Although the actual design process for DORA using arcplan

is quite simple, there are a number of items to consider
before beginning. Because arcplans design environment is
drag-and-drop enabled, developers can simply move
elements around on the screen to determine where items
best fit. But Responsive Design is all about creating
experiences across multiple platforms, and this process is
much smoother if you consider a few things upfront.

Users

Design with mobile in mind. This leads to a

better user experience across all devices and
platforms.

Start with the smallest device first. This will

help streamline your app from the beginning.

Remove non-essential content from mobile

apps. Focus on the key tasks users want to
accomplish and provide options to drill down
further.

Design for interaction. Make it possible to

drill down, add commentary, and easily share
insights. These days, it is even an option to
enable ad-hoc on tablets.

Know thy users. Mobile users and desktop users may want

Create a style guide. To keeping your

very different things and it is important to take stock of their
business applications consistent, create
expectations in advance. When it comes to a BI dashboard
guidelines and best practices for developers to
app, mobile users probably want the same thing as desktop
follow.
users at-a-glance views of performance without much
analytical capability. But mobile users of a planning
application may want something very different than desktop
users: while using mobile devices they may want to review,
update and comment on data. Input dialogs and screens for mobile devices may need special
attention in regard to font size and limited keyboard capabilities to ensure the best user interface
(UI).

Context
It is also important to understand where users might be when using your BI app checking
something quickly on the way to an appointment, walking around on the plant floor, etc. These
users are likely going to use your app with burst-like behavior and you will want to accommodate
that type of usage with design modifications; for example, large filters for quick status checks and
live tiles for highly relevant updates.
You should also consider how your navigation may
need to be adjusted from the desktop app to the
mobile app to emphasize content and common tasks.
If your desktop app has navigation tabs at the top,
you may consider moving navigation to the bottom of
your mobile app if it gets in the way of users primary
tasks. arcplan users automatically have navigation
reformatted for small screens. Once top navigation
tabs become too wide for the screen size, they are
adjusted to a drop-down menu.
The key question in Responsive Design is which
functions are important for a specific device? Your
users purpose is to find what theyre looking for and act
on it. If your app facilitates this, it will be successful.

Responsive navigation:
condense space and
consider drop-down menus
when moving to smaller devices.

arcplan | A Guide to DORA | 8

Content First
Whether designed for desktop, mobile or both, your BI app should put important content front and
center. On a device with limited screen real estate, focus on the most important elements but
provide the option to drill down for additional details. Nothing is more frustrating than visiting a
website on your phone, only to be redirected to a special mobile version that does not provide the
information you need especially when you know it is available on a desktop and the mobile
version simply denies you access to it.
When it comes to mobile BI apps, remove unnecessary elements and adjust visualizations to
maximize the amount of information per pixel. On mobile devices, gauges or speedometers are
not a good idea; they take up too much room without providing much information. Instead, try a
simple box that highlights the speedometer metric a much better pixel-to-information ratio.

Charts & Tables

The best advice is to stack your charts and tables on mobile devices. If you are trying to make a
designed-for-desktop dashboard responsive, the easiest method is to stack each graphic so it is
large enough to be understood on the smallest device without too much zooming. Keep legends,
supporting labels and headlines with each chart.

Finding the Right Views

Finding the right Views for your BI application is crucial. On the one hand it depends on your
content (how dense is it, are you using many related charts, tables, etc.); on the other hand it
depends on the devices used to access your application.
After identifying the most important devices to support, you are ready to define arcplan Views for
your application. The primary input for this process is the screen width of the devices, since you
define the breakpoints for your application based on this information. There is a technical glitch
you should keep in mind: screen width is not the physical resolution of the device, but the CSS
pixel width reported to the browser (e.g. an iPhone 4 will report a device width of 320 CSS pixels
in portrait mode, even though the physical resolution is 640 pixels). A good source for different
device widths can be found here.

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Touch Targets
Touch-enabled devices have an impact on your BI apps navigation and
input behavior. If your app requires users to choose filters, select radio
buttons, or input data, you must consider sizing your touch targets
appropriately. Implement touch targets that are 45-72 pixels wide, and be
sure to include enough space between actions so users wont accidentally
hit the wrong target.
Most phone users holding their device in portrait mode use their right
thumb to navigate apps. While a 45 pixel touch target may work for a
tablet, which most users navigate with an index finger or stylus, for
smartphone apps it is worth going as wide as 72 pixels for better thumb
navigation. Your goal is improving mobile usability and something as
simple as touch target widths go a long way toward user satisfaction.

The green area is safe for

right thumb navigation.

Style Guide
Having a style guide is not a specific requirement for responsive BI applications, but the more
devices you design for, the more important it is to have documented best practices to keep your
apps consistent.
arcplan users can create style guides as arcplan documents, which enable them to directly copy
and paste the formatting from the style guide to a BI application.

Conclusion
Gartner predicted two years ago that by 2013, 33% of BI functionality would be consumed on
handheld devices. With arcplan 8s DORA philosophy, this can finally become a reality. With the
screen size dilemma eliminated, every user can have a positive, optimized experience with their
BI apps on any device. Developers get an easy way to design apps for their organizations
portfolio of devices. And the organization sees increased flexibility in its BI, leading to greater
adoption rates, better decisions and improved performance.
We are happy to discuss how we can make your BI applications aDORAble.

arcplan | A Guide to DORA | 10

About arcplan
arcplan is a leader in innovative Business Intelligence, Dashboard, Corporate Performance and
Planning software solutions for desktop and mobile use. Since 1993, arcplan has enabled more
than 3,200 customers worldwide to leverage their existing infrastructure for better decision
making. Empowering all users to connect and collaborate with relevant information is crucial for
improving business performance. With arcplan it simply works.
arcplans flagship product arcplan Enterprise was rated the #1 3rd party tool for SAP BW, Oracle
Essbase, and IBM Cognos TM1 in The BI Survey 13 (2013).

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