A user experience is more than just pretty visualizations, ease of use, and the reduction of click counts. Yes, these things are important, but you can accomplish even more. Here are five steps to creating a great embedded analytics app that will drive both user satisfaction and adoption.
Understand your target users, including their roles and responsibilities. Keep in mind that these include prospective users.
For each profile, think about how analytics help the business. Quantify the return and assess its true value. Usually, value can be expressed as increasing efficiency and effectiveness, increasing revenue, reducing costs, or improving customer satisfaction.
Match users to one or more personas that best describe how they need to work with data:
To avoid overwhelming users with features, give them access to only the functionality and data they need to work smarter. Release more functionality and data as adoption grows and new questions arise.
Think about how the role of analytics in the application impacts the user experience. We have seen how consumer web applications embed analytics deep into the context of the application workflow. This could very well be a way to improve the user experience and create a differentiated product.
Taking these steps will help you to develop project requirements and to prioritize phases.
The capabilities embedded in each app vary. We have specified the frequency in which we see each feature implemented in the information below:
The main reason software providers take on an embedded analytics project is to improve how data is presented. In addition to satisfying users’ informational needs, the look and feel of these capabilities should align with the style of the embedding application.
Embedding analytics inside the app presents interesting ways for users to interact with their data. These capabilities lead to a more informed and productive UX.
Application providers can enhance the value of the product by giving sophisticated users ways to perform their own analyses, create benchmarks, apply proprietary analytics to their data, and find innovative ways of incorporating external data sets.
Following, users reverted to the adoption of non-traditional BI tools to access their data. This put tremendous pressure on IT teams to get up to date. It also led to the development of new and different approaches to delivering analytics.
Traditional BI platforms have improved but remain essentially the same. New data discovery solutions now offer business analysts something better than Microsoft Excel—with minimal dependency on IT resources.
Choosing the best solution for your dashboards and reports starts with understanding the 4 types of analytics solutions on the market.
Building analytics into your application can be overwhelming as you foresee how far you must go to reach your vision. And inevitably new ideas surface along the way. That’s okay. Before you try to take on the whole ocean, remember to start small and build on your successes. Start with one user, one persona, one problem, and one report. Get feedback and move forward. Requirements shift and evolve over time as users start to see what’s possible. The key is to stay agile and approach embedded analytics in an iterative way.
There’s nothing more frustrating than building out a really cool feature that no one uses. To avoid this, be sure to get regular feedback from internal and external stakeholders. Build enhancements into your appl as demand dictates. Utilize screen mockups early in the process and review these with customers to validate your strategic plan. Ask what they like, what they don’t like, how they would use it, and what suggestions they have to make the product better. This feedback will help you stay focused on solving real user problems. Furthermore, it will enable participants to become advocates when analytics becomes available all over.
You should conduct on-site usability studies with select customers to see how they actually use the app. The point of such a study is to find out in advance what problems will bother your users. Be prepared for users to complain when they are lost or frustrated – that’s exactly the kind of feedback you need. Avoid helping users to get to the right answer. Instead, ask them to complete specific tasks. Learn how they expect to navigate your application to accomplish their tasks. Ask them to rate certain aspects of the app and prioritize enhancement requests. Ask open-ended questions to get the most feedback and avoid questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no.