Visual Analysis Tools: Practical Considerations

So, you’ve spent months working in the lab developing a new visualisation technique or system and you finally got some time with real users. They really like what they’ve seen. You’ve done a good job of writing the paper, it has been accepted and appears on your resume.

But hang on a minute – despite your best intentions and the users’ approval, they aren’t actually using the system right now.  So should you commercialize the idea?  This would mean the ideas are exploited and perhaps could give you some money back for all that hard work.

What are the practical steps you will need to take?

You’ll have to make sure that you actually own the IP on the system too. I’d do that bit first.

Then there are the standard set of business problems like marketing, sales channels, CRM systems, pricing.  And the usual software infrastructure stuff of build systems, installers, change management, testing, documentation.

Installers are a nightmare. ‘But it works on my machine!’ isn’t going to cut it. In real IT environments, the IT manager is a key person you will need on your side. And his/her department will need to test your application for compatibility and other things first.  For desktop applications it isn’t uncommon for deployments to lag from 3 to 5 years behind the current version. That can be very frustrating for you and for your users.

But actually, I’d argue that all those things are a lot easier than the business of really understanding the users needs: that is much harder.  Did the new system really improve their performance? Were they just trying to be helpful and polite when they said they liked it? Or are you seeing well-known experimental biases like the observer-expectancy effect or the Hawthorne effect?

What about the user’s workflow?  How does the tool fit into their existing processes?

If it did increase their performance, could they put a value on that?  And I’m not being theoretical – I’m talking about a real dollar value here. Or some measure of success in terms of the business drivers of the organisation. You will struggle to sell it unless you can talk in business terms that your buyers will use.

In this context one has to question statements like ‘the goal of visualisation is insight, not pictures’. Actually I’d argue that the end goal is action, not insight. The true aim is taking better decisions.

Don’t be disheartened: these issues make a long list, but provided you are providing enough value and provided you think about these up-front you can save yourself a lot of pain for later on. And if you don’t want to think about these things, maybe you could even strike up a licensing deal with someone who does.