Oz Analytics

Building The Perfect User Experience

Can't believe that several weeks have passed since my last post. Financial year end and the re-branding of my day-job company might have something to do with it. Today is also the day we publish the first enterprise wide performance management dashboards across our company. A big (and hopefully successful) step towards bringing more accountability across a diverse media group. If I suddenly change jobs this week then you will know I was wrong.

Turning from the macro to the micro of a software startup, it has also been an eventful few weeks at Six Degrees Of Data (6DD). Despite the technical successes of our linked open data application we were unhappy with the user experience. So in June I launched a UX competition at DesignCrowd. This is one of a number of online marketplaces that have arisen on the web over the last few years. I chose DesignCrowd because they were recommended to me by a friend and they are based around the corner from me in Surry Hills, Sydney.

I've no idea why the latter was important to me but it gave me a good feeling to know that I was (in some small way) helping another Aussie startup. That and the fact that my previous experiences with 99designs (yet another Aussie venture) were not great. They weren't bad either, it's just that I didn't get the wow designs that I had hoped for.

In terms of budget, there is not much difference in the pricing models that I could see. Either way, at a cost of a couple of thousand dollars, we had a chance of getting a new look and feel. Now I admit that directly engaging a talented UX designer would almost certainly deliver a better outcome but the cost was not attractive to us at this stage. We are bootstrapping 6DD and trying to follow lean startup principles. In short, cash is treasured almost as much as equity is.

In this respect 6DD is a bit of an experiment for me. In previous ventures I have taken on external financial partners or provided substantial funding myself. This time we are funded on the smell of an oily rag and we hope to launch to market having spent under $100,000. That's $100K plus a bucket full of blood sweat and tears from the founders of course ...

DesignCrowd was an interesting experience. We didn't get many responses to our design brief (and many less than with 99designs) but there was one designer who stood out to us. He was the clear winner and within a few short weeks we had a full set of re-designed screens. I guess it goes to show that quality trumps quantity most of the time. Finding a single great designer was all we needed.

We are very happy with the results. They still may not be perfect due to time limitations, but they are much better than they were. Also, we have yet to beta test them, so only time will tell if they 'work' for our future users.

There was also the announcement from Apple of iOS 7 that happened right in the middle of this. Initially I didn't like it but it has definitely grown on me. Apple has also subsequently changed some of the typography they recommend so we have taken the plunge and Bridger will reflect the iOS 7 design guidelines.

Here are some sample screens to give you an idea:

 

Remember, our product is called Bridger - hence the screen backgrounds.

It has also been an interesting challenge to develop screens that perform well on mobile devices (primarily the iPhone 5) and in browsers. HTML5 continues to impress me with its capabilities - but maybe it is more due to the skill of the 6DD technical team and they should get the credit. It is becoming difficult to tell which interface (iPhone or browser) you are using when they both support gestures in identical (to the user at least) ways.

I have great hopes that HTML5 will help us in the near future to rapidly create and support other platforms such as Android and iPad.

The tech team are currently integrating these screens into our back-end application and I hope to report soon the completion of our first beta release.

Stay tuned.

Related articles

The Latest On The Next iPhone - Must Read!!!

User Experience: Remember, when it comes to UX, the U comes first.

Changing Tack

My 2 regular readers (thanks mum and dad!) may have noticed that the frequency of my posts has dropped dramatically since 2012. There was a reason for this - beyond my strongly held opinion that those who have nothing sensible to say should simply shut-up. That reason was/is that I have been starting a new venture and the 'stealth mode' has lasted a lot longer than I expected.

In 2012 I suffered an information crisis and I suspected that I was not alone. The crisis arrived because I was being increasingly overwhelmed with information and most of the information swamping me was not on the web. Instead it was in the form of documents and email. I pride myself as being pretty well organised with effective email filters in place and an organised corpus of professional and personal knowledge approaching 1,000,000 objects. Mostly documents of one sort or another.

I was quietly proud of my knowledge management skills but after pride cometh the fall - and in 2012 that's what happened. Let me explain how it happened and I hope the story will resonate with you.

 As a serial entrepreneur and corporate analyst, I have a broad range of professional interests. These range from all aspects of analytics and information management, and broaden out into general management and IT. I am also a bit of a pack rat and if I come across some information that looks useful I store it. For those interested, my tools of choice are Mac OSX, HoudahSpot, DevonAgent and Devonthink.

So over the last 20 years I have built up a very useful corpus of knowledge. By 2011 however I was becoming increasingly frustrated by my inability to effectively use this corpus in my daily work. Each day I need to deal with the usually pile of emails and read/respond to/create multiple documents. This presented the following problems:

1. Identifying and dealing with those emails and documents that I had to.
2. Ignoring the rest.
3. Locating past knowledge/information that would help me to deal effectively with the day's emails and documents.

So the problems were pretty much at the core of what I do.

If only there was a way for me to more efficiently decide whether-or-not a long email or document was worth me reading. Then, when I needed to make a decision or give advice, how could I tap into my corpus of knowledge?

These are the problems solved by my new venture Six Degrees Of Data.

Six Degrees Of Data is building Apps and web services that we hope turn the web on its head. Our first product will launch later this year. It is called Bridger and is an App and Web Service that intelligently evaluates, summarizes and links your documents to trusted sources on the web.

Bridger is a research assistant for busy people suffering from information overload.

We are trying to release the value currently locked inside documents because despite the phenomenal growth of the internet, 80% of the new information created each year is still unstructured – in other words it is text, graphics and video contained in things like documents, emails, Facebook shares, web pages and tweets, etc. This unstructured information is poorly integrated with the world wide web. Even if they are published to a web site, they have remained isolated islands of information – until now.

Within the last five years, the size of the average web page has more than tripled, and the number of external objects has more than doubled. The average web page is now 1 MB and growing at over 20% each year. Today the average web page has about 10 links and 600 words. So it is reasonable to say that less than 2% of the content is hyperlinked to something else.

Your documents often contain only a single link (or less) and many more words than a web page.

If you are lucky, there is a single bridge (hyperlink) from the web to your document. Think of your documents as information that is connected to the web superhighway only via an off-ramp. You can find published documents easily enough because published documents are indexed by the likes of Google and Bing. But what you can’t do is start from your document and get easily back onto the web in an intelligent way.

That’s why we see the current web-document world as a one-way off-ramp.

Bridger builds you an internet on-ramp for all of your documents – whether they are published on the web or not. This is how we can release the untapped value of the 80%.

How do we do this? Well, it’s pretty complicated technically but the good news is that you really don’t have to know about this if you don’t want to. All you need to understand is that Bridger takes your isolated documents, emails, etc. and automatically links them to over 50 billion trusted additional sources of information on the world wide web.

Drop a document on to the Bridger app and it will instantly tell you what the document is about and give you concise profiles of all the relevant people, organizations, places, technologies and more.

Your document is magically transformed into a fully integrated web body of knowledge.

And Bridger is the first of a stream of new products we re planning. Future areas that we will concentrate on are enriching our personal corpus' of knowledge, collaboration and sharing.

So my posts may remain sporadic but I hope to share more about Bridger and our journey as Six Degrees Of Data gets up and running over the coming months.

In the meantime, if you have a passion for the Semantic Web, Linked Open Data, URI's, sparkle and tuples, then give me a call.

 

The Data Journalism Process

As a part of the the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX, I recently blogged about The Guardian newspaper's outstanding work leveraging data. I have done a bit of cutting and pasting and reconstructed the process referred to by Simon Rogers, Editor at The Guardian, in his talk on September 21st, 2011. The talk is available on my blog here.

Click on the image to display a larger version.

Yes, there is a lot of manual work, but it is interesting that The Guardian sees so much value being generated that they are prepared to invest the time and money. I recommend bookmarking their Data Store section.

Day 2 Week 6 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Continuing week 6 - part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 6, Day 2

Theme: Analytics In The Real World

Week 6, Tuesday

This week's theme is application - not in the sense of a computer program - rather in the sense of 'use it or lose it'. This week we look at how analytics is being applied in the real world.

WATCH    Today's task:  Data-Driven Journalism at the Guardian    Streamed

17 minutes

'Data-Driven Journalism at the Guardian', presentation at the Strata New York Summit 2011, Simon Rogers, Editor at The Guardian, September 21st, 2011

Key takeout: The Guardian has reinvented itself as one of the leading users of data analysis while keeping their website free to all. This talk gives you a good overview of how data is driving some of their journalism and how their readers engage with the newspaper.

As always, comments, questions and ideas are all welcome. 

The MBAnalytics is just one part of the Business Intelligence CORTEX - a community of Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Analytics and Project Management professionals in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Membership is free and the forums are very active with over 20,000 posts offering a uniquely Australasian viewpoint.

Day 4 Week 4 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Continuing week 4 - part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 4, Day 4

Theme: Data Visualisation

Week 4, Thursday

This week's theme is data visualisation, or perhaps more accurately, transforming data into insight. Today we have something light and easy to digest - to make up for the challenge of Magicink yesterday. 

WATCH    Today's task:  Statistical Inspiration    (streamed below)

20 minutes

'Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen' by Hans Rosling professor of global health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute and co-founder of Médecins sans Frontièrs, speaking in 2006. Available online here.

Key takeout: Rosling has developed software that can visualize virtually any data set. His talk demonstrates the powerful stories that can be created from data. Combine this with an overwhelming enthusiasm for the subject you are talking about and you have something akin to an unstoppable force of nature. It's this sort of passion that can change the world. Can you harness a little bit of this to advance analytics in your organisation? Oh, and 2 final points: 

• the Rosling software is a free download here.
• The above original presentation has been expanded and featured on the BBC here.

As always, comments, questions and ideas are all welcome. 

The MBAnalytics is just one part of the Business Intelligence CORTEX - a community of Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Analytics and Project Management professionals in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Membership is free and the forums are very active with over 20,000 posts offering a uniquely Australasian viewpoint.

Day 3 Week 4 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Welcome to week 4 - part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 4, Day 3

Theme: Data Visualisation

Week 4, Wednesday

This week's theme is data visualisation, or perhaps more accurately, transforming data into insight. 

READ      Today's task:  MagicInk   2.8Mb

2 hours

'Magic Ink - INFORMATION SOFTWARE AND THE GRAPHICAL INTERFACE' by Bret Victor, 2006. Available online here and his cv is here.

Key takeout: This tour de force introduces a “unified theory” of information graphic (user interface) design. The author argues that information software design should be seen as the design of context-sensitive information graphics. A warning: this paper may be heavy going for some as it is a tightly woven ball of original thought and has been very carefully constructed to present a complex new theory. A theory that has ramifications for the design (purpose?) of all analytic software. To call it thought provoking is an understatement. In a nutshell the theory states that:   

1. Graphic design (user interface) is of paramount importance because you are asking for software to display a complex set of data in a way that you can understand the data and reason about what it means.

2. Context-sensitivity is of value because software breaks out of the confines of print and can uniquely:

• "infer the context in which its data is needed,

• winnow the data to exclude the irrelevant, and

• generate a graphic which directly addresses the present needs".

3. Interactivity - should be minimised as information software "mimics the experience of reading, not working. It is used for achieving an understanding—constructing a model within the mind. Thus, the user must listen to the software and think about what it says… but any manipulation happens mentally".

As always, comments, questions and ideas are all welcome. 

The MBAnalytics is just one part of the Business Intelligence CORTEX - a community of Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Analytics and Project Management professionals in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Membership is free and the forums are very active with over 20,000 posts offering a uniquely Australasian viewpoint.

Day 2 Week 4 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Welcome to week 4 - part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 4, Day 2

Theme: Data Visualisation

Week 4, Tuesday

This week's theme is data visualisation, or perhaps more accurately, transforming data into insight. 

READ      Today's task:  Culturomics 2.0   (Streamed below)

30 minutes

Research Paper 'Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting Large-Scale Human Behavior Using Global News Media Tone in Time and Space', Kalev H. Leetaru, Assistant Director for Text and Digital Media Analytics at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at the University of Illinois and Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Published online by First Monday.

Key takeout: The research reported on in this paper is trying to see if public sentiment can detected by analysing a large digital news archive and then visualising this to understand and predict macro–level changes in global society in both time and space. That's 'predicting the future' to you and me. The answer may surprise you and the sentiment visualisations are interesting. The National Science Foundation funded (at some huge cost?) the creation of the network 2.4 petabytes in size containing more than 10 billion people, places, things, and activities connected by over 100 trillion relationships. How hard can it be predicting your organisation's product or portfolio performance?

As always, comments, questions and ideas are all welcome. 

The MBAnalytics is just one part of the Business Intelligence CORTEX - a community of Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Analytics and Project Management professionals in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Membership is free and the forums are very active with over 20,000 posts offering a uniquely Australasian viewpoint.

Day 1 Week 4 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Welcome to week 4 - part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 4, Day 1

Theme: Data Visualisation

Week 4, Monday

This week's theme is data visualisation, or perhaps more accurately, transforming data into insight. 

WATCH    Today's task:  The Beauty Of Data Visualization     (Streamed below)

18 minutes

TED Talk 'The Beauty Of Data Visualization', David McCandless, author of the blog and book of the same name, Information Is Beautiful (in the US, the book is being called The Visual Miscellaneum), July 2010.

Key takeout: McCandless' work is stunning. It should and does end up in museums but don't let the beauty of his work distract (or daunt) you. Think about why you are stunned, because in my mind it is his ability to translate abstract data sets into something that has meaning free of the specialist knowledge such as statistics, computer science or mathematics. The key takeout is that if you can incorporate visualisations even one tenth as good, then you will have achieved something of value. Why? Because you will have help your users understand something novel. Something that without your work would have remained unknown.

As always, comments, questions and ideas are all welcome. 

The MBAnalytics is just one part of the Business Intelligence CORTEX - a community of Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Analytics and Project Management professionals in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Membership is free and the forums are very active with over 20,000 posts offering a uniquely Australasian viewpoint.

Day 4 Week 1 of the CORTEX MBAnalytics

Part of the 60 day information management refresher course from the CORTEX.

The CORTEX

Master of Business Analytics

Week 1, Day 4

Week 1, Thursday

 WATCH   Presentation:  The beauty of data visualization     180Mb

20 minutes

TED Talk, 'David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization',

by David McCandless,UK blogger, infographicist and author of

'Information is Beautiful'.

Online here where you can stream the video rather than downloading it.

LISTEN     For extra credit: Distilling value from mountains of data   9Mb

15 minutes

McKinsey Global Institute, ' Distilling value and driving productivity from

mountains of data', podcast by MGI senior fellow Michael Chui, 2010.

Online here.

Comments,questions and ideas are all welcome. 

The MBAnalytics is just one part of the Business Intelligence CORTEX - a community of Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Analytics and Project Management professionals in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Membership is free and the forums are very active with over 20,000 posts offering a uniquely Australasian viewpoint.

What's Old Is New Again

It has been interesting to see the amount of attention that data visualisation (rightly) continues to receive. At work I am facing resistance as I try to deliver ways to visualise a wide range of information. David Smith recently posted a poignant reminder that this is really a discussion that should have moved on long ago. David's blog 'Because it's Friday: Keep Calm, and Carry on Charting' takes us into Churchill's WW2 bunker and how dashboards and visualisation was used then.

Check the blog out, it's worth it. And while you're there take a look at the 'German tank problem'. 

Thanks to Justin Castagna for putting me on to this interesting blogger on R and to the guys at Revolution Analytics.

Here's my contribution to the historical perspective. The world's first satnav - sans 'sat' of course:

The Roll-map Routefinder was invented in the 1920s and was designed to be worn on the wrist and used with an odometer. Maps were printed on small rolls of paper indicating turns and waypoints.