Today, I’m sharing my impressions of one of Spotify’s analytics touchpoints—a monthly email I receive with a boatload of design choices I mostly hope you will not copy, especially if you’re working in an enterprise capacity. Most of you by now probably know I have another career as a professional musician, and that includes having three recordings I … Read more
Customers want simple, well-designed decision support tools and UX’s that are actionable. Businesses want to see value from data and adoption of data-driven decision making. However, the UX that is afforded to is often simply a byproduct of the analytics team’s engineering, or, at best, “data viz” efforts—and it’s not working. A decade later, success rates for data projects remain unchanged, despite vendor/BI tooling improvements. What are BI/analytics teams still missing? Design.
In many cases, machine learning needs to be deployed to augment human decision making, not automate it. What are you doing to account for this dependency on the success of your data product?
I performed a rapid UI/UX and data visualization audit on the MITRE Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition Decision Support Dashboard. Watch it here, and see my recommended design changes the team should make.
Covid-19 presents a major disruption to our lives and businesses. However, sanitizing your hands isn’t the only thing you data leaders need to be considering. Your data product, dashboards, or UI may also need to be cleaned up. No hard-to-find Clorox wipes needed; just some good design thinking centered around your customers.
You got the data. Your model rocks. Your analytics are impressive. But, do customers see indispensable decision support….or a metrics toilet?
This is recording of my presentation at the O’Reilly Strata Data Conference in New York City in 2018. Gartner says 85%+ of big data projects will fail, despite the fact your company may have invested millions on engineering implementation. Why are customers and employees not engaging with these products and services? Brian O’Neill explains why a … Read more
Good design happens at the intersection of discovering real user needs/wants and business goals that are ACTIONABLE (by design and engineering). Yes, there’s a little magic/instinct that creeps into good design too, but you can get far without a lot of this magic. It’s really more about nailing the problem set, and having really clear … Read more
Should maximum simplicity dictate success? We all love usability these days right? “User experience is important.” Of course it is! But, it doesn’t mean that every user you show the design to is going to, or should immediately be able to, understand fully what you’re showing them. Why? Most valuable things in life take a … Read more
Today I got an interesting anomaly email from a service I use called Next Big Sound. Actually, I don’t use the service too much, but it crosses two of my interests: music and analytics. Next Big Sound aggregates music playback data from various music providers (Spotify, Pandora, etc) and also, apparently, tries to correlate changes … Read more