A good route to a desirable destination depends on having a good map.
Companies pour money into their business intelligence systems, and why shouldn’t they? It’s a worthy expense for most of them just on the rationale that these systems keep leadership informed on the present and prepared for the future. This is especially true if they employ a specialized data scientist who can interpret and explain that data to the rest of the team.
When workers are used to seamless consumer-grade apps, they have a hard time working with clunky and inefficient platforms. But people find greater productivity when they can use the tools they already prefer or feel confident in.
The companies that can bring a frictionless mindset to accessing and using that data are going to have an advantage over those that don’t. When data moves easily through an organization to inform its employees’ processes and decisions at the base level, it raises the company’s waterline: leaning on data in pursuit of high-quality outcomes will generate more of those high-quality outcomes.
Friction is a term from the world of user experience design, referring to interactions that inhibit people from achieving their goals in a digital interface.
Friction in interface design often stands in the way of those desired high-quality outcomes. It reduces valuable conversions and frustrates would-be customers to the point that they abandon their task at hand.
But using numbers to predict the future shouldn’t be difficult. It should instead be so simple that any invested employee might call up data points, like previous revenue or monthly sales records. But the technological tools that help us do these things tend to be unnecessarily complicated.
Call them what you will business intelligence platforms, data analytics software, or something else entirely but these programs are commonly designed for use by technical experts over laypeople. Some have even become an industry choice by virtue of having so little competition or differentiation in the space.
Excluding any specialized add-ons to reduce this barrier to entry, these platforms offer a rather high-friction user experience, to be sure.
But the standard for UX these days is a zero-friction (also called frictionless) user experience.
The concept presents itself as a kind of platonic ideal: an interface is so thoughtfully designed to anticipate so many needs that the user experiences no friction at all. This person is basically free to use the app at the speed of his or her intuition, because the interface achieves maximum empathy.
The best UI designers are aiming for obvious usability in their software, whether it’s a game, productivity app, or data analytics platform.
But what’s more usable than the everyday speech and language we use to conduct our lives?
AI-driven natural language processing technologies are lately emerging as a compelling way for people to interact competently and confidently with their data. Visualization was all the rage the first time around, but next-generation analytics platforms will let us talk (or type) to our data. We can ask it questions without being specialists, and get strong answers in response.
We’re at the beginning of an age where plain language requests like how much of Product X did I sell last year? or what was 2015 revenue? can be answered as text on a screen or spoken aloud. Natural language processing will be tough to beat In the race to minimize friction in user experience. That brand of technology will make it easier than ever before for employees to actually interact with data.
When it’s easy for employees to interact with data, they make better decisions.
Natural language processing can do a lot of the heavy lifting to shrink the distance between employees and accurate business data. People working in adjacent departments can build an enhanced sense of the other’s needs and goals as they execute different strategies in parallel within the same organization. They rely on a shared pool of data in order to do so.
But access to that data raises the average employee’s business literacy. If you pair this with a frictionless user experience while interacting with that data, they’re going to access it more often. Even a casual awareness of the numbers that drive a business’s overarching strategy can inform on some small level the decisions that those employees make on a daily basis.
When consulting data becomes an employee-wide habit, a business organization only gains strength. Having better access to more business data means having a fuller picture of reality than the competition. There’s a clear link between data and identifying a way to business success those who have the most high-quality data and use it to inform their decisions are going to win in the long term.
The route to a desirable destination might be long and dangerous, but that shouldn’t make the route itself undesirable. Those with a good map can confirm that it’s the best route.