The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
Tim Trefren is one of the founders at Mixpanel, the most advanced analytics platform for web & mobile applications. He has many years of experience building compelling, accessible interfaces to data. To learn more, check out the Mixpanel engineering blog.
Building data products is not easy.
Many people are uncomfortable with numbers, and even more don't really understand statistics. It's very, very easy to overwhelm people with numbers, charts, and tables - and yet numbers are more important than ever. The trend toward running companies in a data-driven way is only growing...which means more programmers will be spending time building data products. These might be internal reporting tools (like the dashboards that your CEO will use to run the company) or, like Mixpanel, you might be building external-facing data analysis products for your customers.
Either way, the question is: how do you build usable interfaces to data that still give deep insights?
We've spent the last 6 years at Mixpanel working on this problem. In that time, we've come up with a few simple rules that apply to almost everyone:
Return to Article