Designing (Big) Data for Exploration & Visualization

Created 8 years ago in Product & Design / Metrics & Analytics

Maybe you're enabling users to explore copious amounts of data. Maybe you're building a sweet new dashboard to make an awesome first impression on your customers. Or maybe you're just trying to visualize your big data in a meaningful way, to help drive decision-making or tell a compelling story.

These are all tough challenges, walking a fine balance between the sheer amount of data, your audiences' levels of technical proficiency, conventional expectations, your technical limitations, and the needs of your sales team for a demo-friendly experience. I've designed for both B2B and B2C audiences - like synthesizing ratings from terabytes of daily data and making huge amounts of records accessible to a broad audience for a cybersecurity company, designing a business-user-friendly node graph visualization (patent pending) to drive risk management decision-making, enabling program management through maps, tables, and reporting for energy efficiency efforts, and reinforcing progress through basic visualizations for an online dating app.

My efforts have contributed to Gartner Cool Vendor ratings, acquisitions for the software platforms, stronger VC pitches (and resulting funding), happier sales teams, and lots of customer satisfaction. I'm a huge nerd about this stuff, and it shows in my results.

I can conduct a quick evaluation of what you're doing today and suggest ways to polish your display or new approaches to make your data more accessible to your audience. If you're still in the earlier design phase, I can also help you figure out where to focus your efforts, the best metrics to hone in on, and the types of visualizations that best fit your needs. (I also usually sketch out some ideas on the spot, which I can send your way after our call.)