Monday, January 26, 2015

Your lovely graphs are useless.

Visualisation used to be everything. If you need to make a point, show it with a nice graph.
A lot of times, when we demo our system to decision makers, they are really impressed with our ability to analyse their data and display it in graphs.

However, while increasing credibility and showing our software's lovely abilities, graphs have a learning curve, and sometimes it takes an expert to analyse graphs and conclude the necessary conclusions. While we accompany our clients during the initial use of the system, not too many of them are keen to learn the delicate art of data analysis, even if it looks great.

This is why we're starting to move towards insights. Instead of showing a scatter chart with quadrants and let the customer deduct where each group is located, we can display them a summary, showing each group's grade - This group consumes too much energy in relation to its throughput. this one is more efficient. A link to the graph is attached, for credibility, however once the customer trust your system, he won't even need it.

Build trust with your customer, and then only show him the bottom line instead of confusing him with complicated visuals. He will feel better treated as a decision maker rather than one of your analysts.



Sunday, January 18, 2015

Do not bury the Laptop just yet...

Four years ago I had an argument with a peer of mine about Chromebooks.
We got a Chromebook from Google, I tested it and found it slow and useless, both as a work tool and a browser. Even battery life was poor.
Laptops (And PCs) seemed to be a decaying platform back then. Tablets were all the rage, and for consumer (And education) seemed like the go to platform.
My prediction was that ChromeOS, which was parallel to Android, was useless, and sales figures approved this.

But Google, with its limitless cash, kept on pushing.
Web tools got way better, becoming usable (Google docs, Office 365, Dropbox to name a few)

The first hit came from Samsung, which sold a 250$ Macbook air lookalike, with decent screen and battery life. It quickly became the most selling laptop in Amazon.

Finally, after finding out that tablets are a nice play tool, but not as good for education, the educational market also caught on.

I'm pretty sure that decent developer frameworks are on their way as well, though the road is still a bit long.

So now, I'm admitting I was wrong - The Google way of doing things (Throwing pre mature products to the market, and then throwing a lot of $$$ on them until they take off) actually works.

Unless you're Google plus.