Infotools Consoles and Viewers reviewed

Simplicity is the hallmark of good design, whether it is for a mobile phone, a website or a piece of software. It is something we are surprisingly haphazard at achieving in market research. Compared to other kinds of corporate data, survey data tends to be complex, and the analysis and reports that come out the other end all too often reinforce rather than reduce complexity by stripping it back to the essential. For New-Zealand-based MR software provider Infotools, the aim of a new range of data reporting tools, which they call Viewers, is to pare back on clutter and bring radical simplicity to data analysis.

In this initial release there are four different Viewers to choose from, InfoPlot, InfoSwitch, InfoTrend and InfoWorld. Each follows the same principles and uses a single chart, accompanied by a small amount of tabular data, to present a related series of measures. These would typically be brands or product categories. Each Viewer is aimed at presenting particular kinds of data. InfoSwitch, for example, presents brand switching behaviour. They are all minimalist Web 2.0 products – users are hardly aware they are using software. Instead they interact with a single webpage containing a chart, sometimes a few figures too and some lists of hyperlinks to other items.

The clean design approach means there are no legends with the charts. Each bar, line or pie slice always has its own label, and the software determines that the labels are always visible, even on quite crowded charts. For instance, in the InfoTrend Viewer, mouse over a trend line and it will highlight it, and the others will shade out. Click on the trend line, and it will split it at that point and redraw the chart to show trends before and after that point.

All across the range of tools, the charts respond intuitively to pointing, clicking and dragging, in ways that avoid the need for any kinds of explicit controls. There are no lists of properties, no menu of options, no clutter: all the control is ceded to the actual data being viewed. Other items are listed on screen to allow you to vary the view. These are organised into measures and demographics. Measures could be from the same survey, e.g. brand awareness, affinity or association, but very powerfully, they could be from other sources: marketing spend, retail performance and so on, all scaled to the same axis. You just pick the ones you want to see together.

Other Viewers offer different views. InfoWorld presents data plotted over a world map and maps covering other geographic regions are also feasible. InfoPlot brings to life two-dimensional plots or perceptual maps, with the same highly intuitive approach to encourage experimentation.

Brand managers could get very interested in InfoSwitch – if data is available on brand loyalty, previous brands or alternative brands used. This shows each brand as a sphere orbiting other brands and the strength of the links between them, with all the Viewer possibilities of moving items around, filtering them and focusing on subgroups, to really understand the interplay of brands as consumers divide or shift their loyalties.

The Viewers offer great flexibility in deployment. You could build them into an intranet, publish them on a website or you could email links to recipients for them to download a package they can run locally on their laptop, without for a permanent internet connection. The technology is built on Microsoft’s excellent Silverlight technology – something we are going to be seeing much more of in software applications for MR. It will run on any browser and any platform.

Infotools also offer what they call Consoles, which are bespoke data delivery portals based on one or more customised Viewers – they are deliberately avoiding calling these dashboards, though the result is definitely dashboard-like in its approach.

Is there a catch? Well, there are potentially two. For many, a deterrent is that neither Viewers or Consoles are offered as standalone software – they are tied into Infotools’ service offer. Only Infotools can build the underlying database and populate your Viewer with your data. However, the database has the same structure as its full-blown Espri cross-tab and analysis tool. They will throw in a copy of this for free if you are using a Viewer. This has the advantage that the numbers in published data and any subsequent ad hoc requests are likely to agree, as they come from the same data source.

The other catch is the constraint imposed by the interface on the number of variables or dimensions you can include. There is space for around 70 items, but as this includes all measures and all the categories of any demographics, you could struggle to accommodate all you need from a sizeable tracker. But, even here, this discipline could be an advantage, as it forces you to focus on the essential.