Over the years, we’ve had the pleasure to work with many great individuals and companies and through our work have gained the ability to sympathize with their experiences of what we like to call “going from 0 to 100."
No, we’re not endorsing excessive speeding in your car. We’re talking about going from having nothing but hopes and dreams about delivering engaging analytics (0) to having an interactive data story that your users don’t want to put down (100).
Because we’ve focused our efforts on taking clients from 0 to 100, commonalities or trends for best practices in the data and design experience (read: everything between 1 and 99) have become increasingly clear. Use these four tips to make your introduction to data products a better, more frictionless experience.
1. Know your audience
What do the end users you have in mind for the product look like? What questions will users ask of the data? What actions will they take with the answers to these questions? These are all things you should know before beginning to work on data products.
Be specific about for whom you are creating a data product. If you try to provide insights for too many types of business roles you run the risk of making it too broad for any role to gather insights from the data.
2. Gather the right data
When putting together the data to be used in your product, it’s important to discern the difference between “more data” and “more records."
More data: It’s not always in your best interest to gather the most “data” possible. By doing this, you run the risk of gathering data that you may not use and wasting money in the process.
More Records: Gathering “more records” (read: rows of data) is a better strategy as you prepare for your data product. Doing so can alleviate the effects of outliers and unearth trends in the data.
3. If you’re new to the data, begin with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and let your users determine what features should be included
Building out all the bells and whistles you think you might need at the beginning the data product’s life can be expensive. Starting with an MVP that is put in the hands of actual end users will help determine what data is actually needed and what design aspects are best for your purposes.
Helps with data: Starting with an MVP helps determine the shape and caveats that exist within your data, and allows your users to make decisions about what data is most important to them.
Helps with design: By starting with an MVP, all of the questions that you and your users have for the data are answered by the design. Additional features can then be added from that point on in a more cost-effective manner.
4. Be open-minded about visualizations
We won’t get into data visualization principles in this section because that warrants a totally separate article, but a simple point here: just because you saw similar data in a pie chart once doesn’t mean that is the only (or best) way to visualize your data.
Because your users are the ultimate consumers of the data, let them be the judges of what visualizations will be most effective for them.
Easy peasy, right? We think so, but maybe that’s only because we’ve helped so many customers get from 0 to 100. If you're still not sure what your next steps should be, we’re here to help. Learn more about our 0 to 100 process by checking out the document below.