An early Christmas present has arrived from the DabbleDB team for the 100 million or so of us that have to work with data on a day to day basis.

They’ve created a do-what-I-mean web tool that lets you show how you want data to be restructured and bang! it’s done. Check out the video.

It’s a great idea and a elegant, easy to use interface. There are so many directions I’d love to see them take this tool.

Cleanupdata is a great name, but they’re really giving you better ways to restructure data. This tool won’t help you find and fix errors and anomalies in data. At least not yet.

I also hope they extend cleanupdata to let people automate these data restructuring operations. If only you could apply a cleanup created in cleanupdata.com to 1,000 Excel spreadsheets or to a database table.

If you like this, it’s worth checking out DabbleDB. They have rethought the database with a database/spreadsheet/web forms/visualizer platypus of a tool. It lets your data be pliable in ways that databases don’t allow, while retaining structure that spreadsheets don’t recognize.

Added: Avi Bryant, one of the authors of the cleanupdata.com service notes that the example in the screencast is motivated by this post on cleaning data in Excel. Compare and contrast. I know most people would prefer to avoid ="("&MID(H2,1,3)&") "&MID(H2,4,3)&"-"&MID(H2,7,4) in order to format a phone number.

A couple years ago we released our first baby dashboard design. I’ll admit it was a bit rudimentary. It tracked only the most basic measures and offered little insight into your baby’s current mindset. I was a new father and had a relatively superficial understanding of the nuances of babies, not to mention actionable baby metrics.

With the arrival of my second child, I set to work designing a dashboard that would give a parent all the important information they need, presented in ways that let them react to baby data even in a harried household. Let me present the prototype of our new Baby Dashboard 2.0, modeled by my daughter Maya.

We use the same heads-up display technology as in our first release, but now with more sophisticated data collection techniques we’ve included a meltdown prediction chart and real-time translation engine.

There are a few features in here that I believe demonstrate important fundamentally design principles for great Information Experiences:

• Choose metrics and information that a user can act on. Information that is just interesting isn’t worth a random pile of ones and zeros. You need information that you can act on. In BD 2.0, we wanted to deliver news you could use, in the moment. The “meltdown fuse”, for example, is a way to measure how close your baby is to freaking out. As she gets tired, sick, or hungry, her fuse shortens to the point that a simple disruptive act — a loud noise, Mom walking out of the room — will set off a meltdown. You need to know how close you are to this threshold so you can minimize the smallest of disruptions.

• Draw attention to the information that is most urgent. While the dashboard provides detailed trend breakdowns, the most important thing for a parent is the current state of things. The top bar of the dashboard answers the most critical questions always on a parent’s mind: 1) How close is my baby to melting down? 2) Does my baby need any of the basics: food, sleep, or clean diaper? 3) What is my baby trying to say to me?

• Progressively reveal data as the user expresses interest. Like a busy executive, a parent doesn’t have time for all the information at once. They are on a need-to-know basis. If a parent needs to get a better sense of the potential meanings of a baby word (“daaah”), a single click will give a breakdown of the most likely interpretations.

• Different views for different audiences or perspectives. BD 2.0 provides distinct views for baby status and parent status. The parent status (not shown) was added because we recognized that the mental state of the parent was as important to a happy child as a clean diaper.

For those of you who expressed interest in licensing our Baby Dashboard 1.0 technology, please be patient while we work out the bugs in this next release.

In case you missed it, Information Week recently released a report that listed, among other things, the "top 10 roadblocks to BI success" (skip to page 48 for the list). So, does anyone want to guess what IW found the top barrier to be?

As it turns out, it wasn't "data throughput", or "access to data sources/more data", or even "more features". The number one barrier to BI success, according to IW, is (get this) "Complexity of BI tools and Interfaces". That's right, it's not technology, but usability that keeps people from getting value from BI solutions. People actually want software that's easier to use, not harder.

In our eyes, this is just another example that the BI industry isn't being constrained by the technology. We don't need more tools, or even more features. The problem isn't going to be solved by technology. What we need are solutions that, for people who depend on information, make it easier to see, understand, and use the information that really matters. What we need are solutions that are designed for a purpose, that transform data into easy to understand information, and that are beautifully usable.

Oh. Wait a minute. That's what we do.

Have you ever tried to define a word such as "design"? It's not too easy. Here's what the New Oxford American Dictionary says:

design |dəˈzīn| noun

2 purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object

I guess that probably covers it. But then again, I find myself asking my favorite question: "So what?". I mean, what does it help me actually get done?

It looks to me like the folks over at Duarte Design have it figured out. Nancy Duarte made this post regarding the recent DesignThinkers2008 conference. In it, she very astutely stated "[proper] design isn’t about decoration, it’s about meaning and access to information". Very cool.

It's easy to "get your flash on" and decorate information visualization up with all sorts of glassy, bouncy and flying designs; they might even be considered "tastefully stylish". But if you haven't focused on the meaning in the information and haven't made it accessible to the observer (i.e. understandable so they can actually do something with it), you've missed the purpose of the whole design process. So when you're designing a solution for those you love, make sure you stay purpose driven.

Thanks Duarte for helping us keep our eyes on the ball!

(For those of you who might not know who Duarte Design is, among other things, they were heavily involved in the design of the presentation Al Gore used in "An Inconvenient Truth." If you're interested in how to communicate better through presentations, check out their blog slide:ology.)

When people contact us at Juice, they sometimes don’t have a complete picture of what we do. Our obsession with finding better ways to communicate information is obvious, but how it adds up to something relevant to their business isn’t always as clear.

The answer: We design, prototype, and develop great Information Experiences™.

Information Experience™ is our way of describing the intersection between user experience and information-intensive applications, where success is how effectively a user can consume, understand, and apply that information.

Like sitting behind the wheel of a BMW or my two-year-old flipping through photos on an iPhone, great Information Experiences have less to do with features and more to do with an intimate connection between human and device. Great information experiences tell stories where data is the primary medium for communication. The information appears when it is needed and the device or application seems to anticipate the next question or action. These are the objectives that we apply to the solutions we design and build.

Designing Information Experiences spans from the highest architectural model of a system to the specific details of user/interface interaction and data visualization. Across these levels, we consider four objectives:

1. Support the achievement of organizational objectives. How can the information experience fit into users’ existing decision-making and work processes? How can we influence decision-making with the right information at the right time?

2. Direct the user to likely actions in order to “get it done”. What are the important questions a user is trying to answer or tasks the user wants to accomplish? How can the application make it as easy and intuitive as possible to get to results? Does the navigation and user flow feel like an extension of users’ thought process?

3. Present only the information that needs to be seen. For any given view of data and situational context, what is the most critical information to share with the user? How can information be progressively revealed to give the user what they need to know at any given time?

4. Present the information in a way that produces understanding and action. For any given data and situational context, what is the most effective information visualization? What are the best ways to present information given users’ experience and sophistication with interpreting information? What is the appropriate level of detail to be displayed given the context and user needs?

When we talk about the social rather than technical challenges of Business Intelligence, it is motivated by the belief that too many vendors are more comfortable tackling technical details rather than evaluating how users can interact and gain value from information. Which is to say: design better Information Experiences.

That’s what we do here at Juice. And we have people skills! We are good at dealing with people! Can’t you people understand that!

I recently came across a white paper on the "five styles of BI" and thought that would be an interesting read. As it turns out, more interesting than I expected. In this paper, the vendor (in order to protect the innocent, we'll just call them MacroTactics) made a statement regarding the performance capacity of this particular vendor's solution: 72,000 reports per hour. Let's see, 72,000 reports per hour... that would be 576,000 reports in an 8 hour day... and 149,760,000 reports per year. Wow. Who's reading that stuff?

Now, I fully buy in to the fact that applications that deal with lots and lots of data need to be hugely scalable, but what I don't buy is how this is in any fashion a measure that anyone can use to figure out if a particular BI solution is right for them. I can just imagine the requirements spec for that solution: "15.1.182.f - Solution must be capable of creating 70,000 reports per hour. Alternately, solution will be able to generate 140,000,000 reports per year." 140 million reports! Incredible. (Now, what did I do with my mini-me?)

Seriously, here's the thing. More reports is rarely the answer. We already have plenty of data and plenty of reports. What buyers and users really want is fewer reports and more information that helps them get their jobs done better and faster.

We'd encourage business intelligence vendors to think of themselves more as data storytellers than data factories churning out generic report widgets…even if they can do it at incredibly high speeds. From this perspective, you wouldn't want to hear Steven Spielberg bragging about his ability to pump out a dozen movies a year or J.K. Rowling trumpeting her ability to write 1000 pages a year (hmm, wait a sec).