My 30,000ft view: When looking at large sets of data, users want to go beyond the obvious, and see the interesting. Comparing and contrasting different combinations of data is when trade-offs are revealed, and the basis for what to do next. The challenge in data analytics products is how to make it easier to see the effect of x on y, in a data set. The less people have to think and dig in order to synthesize, the more value they will perceive of the product.
My 3ft view: In B2B, I’ve observed that difficult tasks end up costing the internal customer support team. Finding out where customers get stuck and creating experiences that make it easy to point customers to simple explanations can have significant impact on operational efficiency, and quite frankly, their morale! Support teams can easily get burnt out on repeatedly having to walk clients through the same tasks.
Here are some principles that I used for this project:
- Data at user’s fingertips
- Users can easily find their data when looking for something specific
- Users can seamlessly browse through their data when they are testing a hypothesis, or learning more about patterns
- Don’t make me think
- Users want synthesis vs. a comprehensive data set to sift through
- Users can lose track of what they’re trying to achieve if they have too many dials to turn
More to come on how I applied these principles in the upcoming weeks …
Karen Wong 