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–what I sometimes call—”Capital D Design”—has the power to make your data sing, delight customers/users, bring new/better ROI to your organization, provide inspiration to teams, reduce complexity, reduce engineering cost, save time for users, and expose new value in your existing service. However, the big gains usually don’t come from focusing on the surface level alone. Better data visualization cannot fix every data product and analytics problem.
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
I’m working with a large, household-name technology company right now on a large project, and they struggle with one of the same things so many of my clients struggle with. Today’s topic is articulating use cases and goals in an effective manner that allows your design and development to proceed with clarity and accountability. If … Read more
Today I want to respond to a reader who answered a previous email I sent you all about your top concerns designing for analytics. Here’s Évans’ email: +++++ In analytics, it’s not like a CRUD [Create-Read-Update-Delete] with a simple wizard-like workflow (Input – Validate – Save). It’s kinda hard to keep the user focused when there are … 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
Post-truth. The 2016 word of the year. Yikes for some of us. This got me thinking about UX around data, analytics, and information, and what it means when we present conclusions or advice based on quantitative data. Are those “facts”? If your product generates actionable information for customers, then during your design phase, your team … Read more
You can save $10,000 / week pretty easily through better design. One of the values that clients don’t always understand is that good design not only improves customer experience and drives revenue, but it also reduces time wasted on engineering the wrong product/feature/design. My solution to this is to get design involved ahead of engineering … Read more
Let’s talk about honeymoons for a second. I don’t mean that trip to Cancun, but instead, those first couple weeks of product use where people are evaluating your service, and hoping to realize some of the values that drove them to become your customer in the first place. Some people call this “onboarding,” but I … Read more
If you’re in the analytics space, then you almost certainly have at least one “dashboard” customers use. I generally define dashboards as the landing page for your product when people log in, and so keep that in mind as you browse today’s design suggestions: Your dashboard is probably too low on information density. Dashboards with … Read more