18. Usability
Easy to use?
Where did people have
problems?
Could we make it more
efficient?
Faster?
What features are
hidden or underused?
Thursday, March 19, 2009
19. Usability Functionality
Easy to use? What else should
SalesData do?
Where did people have
problems? Which questions are
hard to answer now?
Could we make it more
efficient? How can we make it
easier for buyers &
Faster?
sellers to work
What features are
together?
hidden or underused?
Thursday, March 19, 2009
20. Usability Functionality Infrastructure
Easy to use? What else should How can we develop
SalesData do? faster?
Where did people have
problems? Which questions are Make it easier for
hard to answer now? others to use the data?
Could we make it more
efficient? How can we make it Make sure we can
easier for buyers & grow?
Faster?
sellers to work Make it go faster!
What features are
together?
hidden or underused?
Thursday, March 19, 2009
105. When:
• Alpha users
• May/June
• Beta users
• July/August
If you’re interested, leave us your card or email
salesdata@booknetcanada.ca
Thursday, March 19, 2009
106. MICHAEL TAMBLYN
BOOKNET CANADA . MTAMBLYN@BOOKNETCANADA.CA . 416.362.5057 X229
Thursday, March 19, 2009
107. BNC SALESDATA v2.0
PROJECT
SALES REPORTING AND COLLABORATIVE COMMERCE
DATE
MARCH 11, 2009 MICHAEL TAMBLYN, BOOKNET CANADA
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Hinweis der Redaktion
This is a big day -- we’re doing something we don’t normally do -- show work that is still in development. Usually we keep things under wraps and then spring them on you out of the blue, but this is big, so it deserves a preview. Think of it like the ultrasound pictures that happy parents-to-be send around. So some of it might be a bit blurry, you may occasionally go “is that an arm or a head?” but we hope you’ll be happy all the same.
Now, to be clear, I am not the parent. I’m not even the midwife. I’m more like the nurse that takes the baby out of the little basin and holds it up to the window. The proud parents are in this room -- none of this would be possible without the incredible, herculean efforts of the SalesData team. Jackie, Noah, Pamela, stand up and take a bow. So what are we going to talk about today. We are going to talk about (# -- time
I’m also going to torture the BookNet team a bit by letting you know who is responsible for what. Some of them are raging extroverts, some of them not so much, but they’re doing such fantastic work that I really want you to know who has put all of this together. So it will be a sort of delicious embarrassment.
That number is owned by Pamela Millar, who answers questions and grabs ideas for new features from (#)
almost 1400 users -- and those are active users -- logging in and running reports, not including recipients of saved and shared reports.
And that number belongs to the dauntless Tim Middleton, who is on a first name basis with every bookstore owner, buyer, category manager in the country.
we’re processing 7M rows of retail data per week
which means we’ve processed about 1.2B rows of data since we started in 2005. Every one of those has been watched over with loving care by Noah Genner, our Technology Director, who, in addition to many, many other things, pushes the final button to launch the weekly data process.
So last march we decided to take stock of where we were. And we wanted to look at a couple of areas:
If you dev. web apps and you’ve never done a full-on usability test, it’s a treat. We work with an incredible company called.
..
and they use a pretty standard methodology. You provide them with a list of things that you think users should be able to do, like: find the sales history of a title, create a bestseller report, change their password, that kind of thing. They bring in real users -- people who are using your system every day. You’re kicked out of the room. And they ask the users to do the things that they’re supposed to be able to do.
You get to watch the whole thing in another room on (# -- hidden cameras)
hidden cameras. They’re not really hidden, but they’re not terribly obtrusive. So you can watch, but you can’t help.
(You know those dreams where you can see people but they can’t see you and you can’t touch them and they’re going into danger but you can’t stop them. And you scream and wave your arms and it just doesn’t matter.)
It’s kind of like that.
Especially if you were the one designing things. That thing that you really liked, confuses people to death. That thing you weren’t sure about but you thought people would figure out -- they can’t figure it out.
We had one user -- a smart person. Who thought that SalesData was:
The front page.
and (# -- the ISBN box)
He did not know that (# -- this screen
Did not know that this screen existed. Thought that you could only look at one book at a time.
And that’s not his fault. We found things that we thought were obvious that weren’t. Things that we understood that other folks didn’t. It’s a really hard look in the mirror.
We also spent a lot of time talking to users about ( # - “what else” --
What else do you want SalesData to be able to do? What is hard to do right now? What questions are hard to answer. A couple of big themes came up.
Users wanted us to spend more time thinking about time, looking at book sales over time.
So right now I can get a slice of time, and I can get that for any particular date.
And I can see the sales history of a particular title
- easier to see what’s happening across accounts
- how are our sales doing at a particular retailer vs. last year
They also wanted a home page that was more about them. Not just what are the bestselling titles and numbers for the whole market, but what is happening at *my* place -- my publishing house, my distributor, my store.
people gave us a ton of stuff to work with, which is fantastic.
We also looked behind the scenes.
Right now, it’s 8 hours from when the last data gets in to crunch the 7,000,000 rows into the reports you see.
Wanted to make it easier to do custom analytics, both for BNC Research and for users who have specific questions that don’t make sense as features in the service.
We also took a look at how we see SalesData evolving over the next few years.
Basically, we’re in the home stretch of a complete rebuild of the SalesData system, while keeping the current system running, without adding any extra staff.
So I want to walk you through some of the changes, some of the new features. I’m not going to do live demos, because that is the second scariest thing in software development. The first scariest is when your development team says “Oh sure, I can fix that. It will just take a second.” But I offer you a choice:
(vote: pretty but dead?
functional but a little ugly?)
Real website it is. But since you have chosen the working website, I must administer...
...
Please raise your right hand and repeat after me...
((switch to browser -- SalesData Classic first.))
So here’s SalesData v.1.0 -- known from here on in as SalesData Classic.
((give a quick tour))
have always competed with...
For the great work you’ve seen, real live and breathing, a big round of applause for Jackie Fry, our project manager in charge of development. Every imperfection you saw was like a knife in her side. (You can let go of the chair arms now...)
And we haven’t shown you everything that we’re working on. There’s more...
(why)
(explain)
- more reports that give an overview of what’s going on in your company right now.
We’re looking at merging SalesData & Prospector together
- two systems, two log-ins...
we’re starting to look at how we can make it easier for buyers and sellers to work together using the data that they see. If you see a book that’s about to go out of stock, you should be able to flag that for a particular buyer in a particular store and know that they got the message. You should be able to link together titles that are comparable. Generally, how can you make it easier to bring sales or stock information to the person who needs to see it?
What a lot of this boils down to is: don’t tell me everything, just tell me what I need to know. You should be able to receive reports that show (#--
What a lot of this boils down to is: don’t tell me everything, just tell me what I need to know. You should be able to receive reports that show (#--
and some other things, like how do we make online catalogues smarter. And that kind of stuff we’ll talk about tomorrow.
This is a big day -- we’re doing something we don’t normally do -- show work that is still in development. Usually we keep things under wraps and then spring them on you out of the blue, but this is big, so it deserves a preview. Think of it like the ultrasound pictures that happy parents-to-be send around. So some of it might be a bit blurry, you may occasionally go “is that an arm or a head?” but we hope you’ll be happy all the same.
Now, to be clear, I am not the parent. I’m not even the midwife. I’m more like the nurse that takes the baby out of the little basin and holds it up to the window. The proud parents are in this room -- none of this would be possible without the incredible, herculean efforts of the SalesData team. Jackie, Noah, Pamela, stand up and take a bow. So what are we going to talk about today. We are going to talk about (# -- time
