User Experience

User experience, commonly abbreviated as UX, describes the overall interaction a user has with a company, product, service, and even with sales and support lines. Every little detail matters for the customer user experience.

Of course, UX is a common practice for software applications, but it hasn’t yet been fully embraced in the world of business intelligence and analytics. Beyond colors, fonts, and interactivity, UX is about having a deep understanding of who your users are and how they prefer to work with data.

To improve the UX of analytics, identify your personas and determine the experience that will help each of them be more productive. insightsoftware developed the Continuum of Self-Service model to facilitate this process. The three personas on the continuum – consumers, creators, and analysts – each use data to make decisions in different ways, and therefore they each have different UX needs.

Regardless of where your users fall along the continuum today, or even where they move over time, you can refer to this model to match each persona to the appropriate functionality.

Along with the user interface, UX is important for driving broad user adoption. For example, not all users are “pivot-table” compliant. Focus in on the target user and their needs and capabilities, and deliver an analytics experience that is engaging and fits that end-user.