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Recent Articles by Brian
What’s wrong with the analytics in the NEST thermostat’s monthly report?
It’s homework time! Let’s talk about NEST (Thermostat) for a minute. In particular, their monthly report. I have a thermostat and hot water radiators in my house (no central air). Each month, the NEST device sends me a report of … Read more
Is your product producing automated insights/recommendations based on…fluff?
Ah, fluff. It’s a great word, and it was actually born in its marshmallow form just a mile away in Somerville, MA. There’s even a fluff festival. A few weeks ago, we talked about the various levels of maturity that an … Read more
Here’s one of the simplest ways to simplify complex analytics
This design “no-no” appears almost every time a new client [with a product that displays analytics] asks me to review their UI/UX. More often than not, I’m not provided with any relevant user tasks/usage contexts by which I can do my … Read more
What happens when you use templates for dashboards and analytics products?
I hear it all the time on Quora, in real life, and from clients: “What BI tool should we use to visualize our data? Is there a good dashboard template you know of?” When it comes to designing analytics products … Read more
Maybe your product’s problem is information *underload*
We’ve all heard about information overload, and the paradox of choice. Don’t you love those thai menus with every type of sauce, noodle, and protein, all written out as separate dishes? “I’ll have item D132 with no water chestnuts….no, I … Read more
Do you have a metrics toilet on your hand?
When I work on products that primarily exist to display analytics information, I find most of them fall into roughly four different levels of design maturity: The best analytics-driven products give actionable recommendations or predictions written in prose telling a user what … Read more