DATA SHED - Initial Ideas

For this brief I have the opportunity to incorporate my style and own personal touches within the design. Initially the Data Shed is wanting 3 illustrations doing for the sliding feature as you can see below. They are wanting illustrations that are a bit quirky and different. They are a new start up company which is heavily tech based which can be quite frightening to people who have no idea about technology etc. so the illustrations have to bring some life and fun to the company. They need to draw in the audience whilst also being informative and playful.

As you can see the website looks pretty white and dull at the moment and definitely needs some life bringing to it. They are wanting to get rid of the stock imagery that is currently being used and replacing it with something allot more visual exciting and 'quirky' as essentially it is quite a crazy products.

The company offers various tools which help businesses analyze all their data. The data shed analyzes all

that data and presents it to the customer in the form of charts, stats and easy to understand figures. The point of the product is to help business and point out what aspects are affecting their sales, revenue etc.

They analyze all different types of data from how weather affects sales, to customer duplications etc. The amount of data that is used is quite impressive. I am really excited to work with data shed and have already come up with a few ideas of routes I could go down.

I have spoken with the Datashed this week and they will be emailing me a propper brief out as soon as possible, but things a pretty chaotic at Datashed at the moment so I should have it in the net few days. This will give me some stronger guidelines to work with as allot of the correspondence so far has been in person rather than in writing. I have a rough idea of what they are wanting but until I get the real brief I won't have strict rules to work to

INITIAL IDEAS

After speaking with Ed about the brief I went away and drew up some quick ideas which I think ties in well with company and also highlights the companies product in a fun and creative way. I wanted to try think of ways I could create visually interesting illustrations but also highlight the concept. I really liked the idea of taking the company name and working on this as the actual concept. I think the data shed is a brilliant name, and in fairness the software analyzes a shed load of data like a machine which then results in an easy to understand visual format for companies. I thought that creating some kind machine like shed would be perfect. I thought it would be great to have some kind of input output feature with the shed which shows the mass of data go in and a simple format for the output. As you can see above, these were my first ideas, I think using the shed for the imagery makes the product accessible to a wider audience, techy computer stuff sometimes puts people off so having something like shed gives a more human link.

I also came up with several other ideas. I wanted to think of imagery which I could work with. My concept for the company is that essentially there is a problem to solve and datashed put all the right pieces together, they do the hard the work and present it to the customer in a form they can understand. So with this in mind I thought of products and puzzles where essentially there is messy data to start with and then a finished resolved solution.

Here are some concepts I came up with:

The Rubix Cube : Hard to solve problem - could experiment with this object further?

Jigsaw - This could be a good bit of imagery to work with each puzzle piece could have symbols for different types of information on. This could be shown being put together in a way that the viewer can make sense of the bigger picture.

Data shed pieces : Could create the shed using different aspects of charts etc.

Data Cake : Ingredients - different information out come data chart cake

These were all playful ideas which I need to pitch to the company.

Digital Design

After having a vision of what I wanted to produce for one of the illustrations I sat down and bashed out my idea. I went with a subtle orange brown colour scheme as the Datasheds logo is quite a bold bright orange so the imagery was quite intense.

Here are the colours I have used for the design

Initial Shed Design

 I added the conveyer belt for an input output element to the design

which shows the data going in and a resolved outcome.

I wanted the Shed to look like an actual machine. I added cogs etc to make it look

more mechanical this represents the hard work and heavy lifiting of the data.

I struggled to think of what I could use to the represent data which they process.

I decided to go with a stream of numbers. And a charted outcome. I was not overly keen on

the data but it was a good start to work with.

FEEDBACK

I was pretty happy with the style of illustration and the general concept of the design. I sent the design over to Ed at the Datashed to see what he thought of my initial idea for one of the illustrations and I was really pleased with what he had to say about the design. But did have a few corrections for me.

Email from Datashed

Feedback Overview

I've shown the two images to Anna, and we both like the initial interpretation a lot. You've got it right, in that the datashed essentially takes in pretty much any data, does some heavy lifting, and turns the data into more than the sum of the original parts. From my perspective, I like the idea of a shed, because an engineer is usually much more pragmatic and down to earth, compared with typical IT people who never actually get anything useful done. We build things that last, and don't just talk about it.

A couple of initial thoughts on the 'shed':'

1. Data is generally hard to get at, and pretty dirty.. so perhaps the input isn't quite as clean as a single stream. To be honest, its usually a big dump of cr@p!

2. The outputs are generally analytics (basically forecasting an outcome, predicting something), data visualization (so charts, or interactive reporting tools, like http://thedatashed.azurewebsites.net/dashboard  or customer selections (so taking a load of categorized customer by sales performance, or likelihood to purchase something). 

3. Not sure if this could fit in the same image; but I think soemthing that's important is being able to give decent visual examples of how two or more sets of data could be combined to bring something valuable..... so bringing your sales figures together with your purchase and costs information gives you your profit, combining weather information with sales in your stores can help show why sales were so bad on a snowy day, facebook and twitter data can be combined with your information relating to a customer which gives you a much broader view of a customers likes and dislikes

Ed Thewlis

Director - Technology

 Alterations

After taking on board Eds feedback I got rid of the continuous stream of numbers and decided to create Icons which I thought represented the type of data that might be analyzed. This is a much better visual interpretation of the data. It also shows the diversity of analyzing various types of data and pulling it all together to create something that is simple and easy to understand for the customer.

Ed mentioned that usually the data is pretty hard to get at and is usually a big heap of rubbish so I got rid of the fluidity of the data input and created a pile of data which sums the company product up allot better than the stream of data.

I created a few different symbols to represent various types of data which could be included.

 Profit, customer profiles, web based data,

Sales figures, business details, weather, mail

Recent Versions

I think I like this version better with the box of everything you need to know. I think it looks more interesting than the chart version below. I have also managed to include the companies online brand font also.

 

I have sent these versions off to the data shed and am waiting to hear back from them with a more detailed brief as I have still to produce more illustrations.

Data Shed - Research

In order to get an idea of the Icons and software I would be designing for I looked around to see what was already out there. The main bulk of the icons I had an idea about already but a few I was unsure about. Here is some of the research into information and the icons I will be designing for. 

What the Datashed do:  http://www.thedatashed.co.uk  (taken from website)

Our core product - a simple and robust place that pulls all your data sources together, matches & stores the records and keeps them up to date so you can view it together in the same tool.Bolted on to TheDataShed are simple, web-based tools which allow you to analyse and interrogate your data wherever you are, whatever device you are on. These analysis tools are also embedded within Microsoft Excel, ensuring a simple, familiar interface for all your staff The back-end of TheDataShed is a powerful (geek alert!) OLAP database. Simply put, we've taken complex data, and built a system which stores it in such a way that you can run reports on millions of records in seconds. Using TheDataShed, you can analyse your costs and revenue clearly, look at previous marketing campaigns and make selections, and feed these selections back for future analysis. You can feed in prospecting databases and dedupe against your current customers, input offline campaign results to get a view as to how your prospects and customers have responded – the possibilities are endless… 

Ever since the days when the proprietor of a business stopped knowing each of his customers individually, the challenge has been clearly understanding who your customers are and reducing the number of duplications of the same customer within your database. If the same customer has moved house and got married and reregisters how do you know to append their previous purchase history to their new record? Pulling these seemingly separate customers together makes both analysis and marketing more applicable. 

With the advent of E-Commerce, and increasing marketing channels (SMS, Email, Direct Mail, Social Media) this has become increasingly difficult. How can you be sure you're not spending money targeting an individual three ways, when one would do? How can you understand if the initial cost of acquisition is worth the long term customer value? Having a Single Customer View allows you to get a true view on how your customers are performing and where you should be investing your marketing budgets. Do you get spikes in your sales when you’ve had a TV campaign? Let's input your slot times and find out! How do your customers respond? Sent a DM campaign out but not everyone responding using the tracked phone number? How inconvenient.
Upload the campaign data and let's match it to your customer base to see if you had responses through other channels. 

Our Single Customer View tool helps overcome a variety of challenges. Utilising some pretty clever string-matching techniques (even if we do say so ourselves!), we take all your different data sets, and mash them together to produce one single list of individuals and families, making sure that none of the data gets lost along the way.

Our simple database solutions allow you to manage any operational process or workflow. They are focussed on swift, cost-effective development - so whether you need a system to manage your HR data, finance processes or CRM, we can build it for you in days, not weeks.As with all our products, the ability to integrate our database solutions with any other system is paramount. As a result, we construct our applications to allow easy (but secure!) access to anyone or anything who needs it, and because we’re all about analysis and insight, we can build you bespoke analysis tools to go with it.

Single Customer View

A Single Customer View is an aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data known by an organization about its customers. The advantage to an organisation of attaining this unified view comes from the ability it gives to analyse past behavior in order to better target and personalise future customer interactions. A single customer view is also considered especially relevant where organisations engage with customers through multiple channels, since customers expect those interactions to reflect a consistent understanding of their history and preferences. However, some commentators have challenged the idea that a single view of customers across an entire organisation is either natural or meaningful, proposing that the priority should instead be consistency between the multiple views that arise in different contexts.
Where representations of a customer are held in more than one system, achieving a single customer view can be difficult: firstly because customer identity must be traceable between the records held in those systems, and secondly because anomalies or discrepancies in the customer data must be resolved^. As such, the acquisition by an organisation of a single customer view is one potential outcome of successful Master data management. Since December 2010, maintaining a single customer view has become mandatory for UK banks and other deposit takers due to new rules introduced by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

Icon Research Single Customer View

I searched the web for examples of single customer view icons to get an idea of what was out there and found that there was barely any, and the majority that I found were over complicated or looked tacky and dated.

 Analysis Icon

 

 Allot of the icons I found were a bit too detailed and over complicated for icons in my opinion. There are far too many colours and shadows which makes the icon look more like a picture than anything. This will not reproduce well on a small scale.

The ones above are more relevant to what I am looking for. I think one colour is perfect for the job. The icons need to be simple and eye catching but also readable on a small scale. This means I should stick to one colour ideally. I like the idea of the magnifying glass, I think there is potential with that imagery.

 Hosting Icon

These icons work well however some a still a bit too complicated when shrunk down onto a smaller scale. I like the idea of the cloud connecting, and also the house with the cables, this could work with datashed. I like the simplistic illustration style. In this case I think 2 colours works well, there is also potential here to work with.

What I found with allot of icons is that they are not actually that clear in what they do, you have to have some existing knowledge in order to get the reference. I like the simplicity of these icons however I still think they are lacking something.

Integration Icon

 From pulling together all your different data sets from your finance system, E-commerce platform, social media sites or online analytics provider, or extracting customer records for a marketing campaign, visualising your data or analysing business performance, datashed have the tool to help. Each tool has been constructed so that it can work independently - but also integrate with the rest of the suite.

I really like bother of these ideas, the jigsaw puzzle piece is definitley memorable and is quirky and different which is what datashed is looking for. I also like the idea of the linked chains which also strongly reference integration.

I also like the idea of the cogs this is a nice visual reference my only concern is that its quite big which makes shrinking it down to be a readable understandable icon is another story.

Apps Icon

The tradition Apple apps Icon is memorable and destinguisable but the elements which go together to make up the logo are completley unrelated to the kind of stuff datashed deals with. It needs to be simple and relevant. This is going to be a tough icon to create as it is quite ambiguous.

This design referes more to application windows which is again not what datashed are looking for. There idea of the applications is the tools nesecary to analyse the data not a specific applications folder.

Database Icon

The majority of icons I came across for the database revolved around this imagery seen above which is an old school hardrive. This is a recognisable icon but for those not familiar with computers it is actually not that relevant in my opinion. I will have to come up with something which is recognisable simple and eyecatching.

Consultation Icon

The icons I found for consultation were quite obvious but clear and readable in my opinion, they could be a bit simpler if anything as a few of them were over complicated I really like the speech bubble icons, this is simple and to the point. It references the point well and there is not much need for lots of detail or colour.

Data Shed Brief

The DataShed Client brief


Overview: 

The DataShed is a new business set up to support other business with their data problems. In an area that’s baffling and laden with nerd and technology speak we want to cut through the noise and simplify data and analysis for our customers. The main premise is that customers email, complain, buy, log in, tweet, chat on facebook, register, request brochures, research online then visit in store, view tv ads, call to chase an order, buy online then pick up in store etc… how to business attribute all these different behaviours to the right customer so you can get a true view how each customer interacts with your business? We consolidate all the businesses data sources into one place and then group actions by customer so the business can make better decisions based on an accurate picture of their world. 

We require a number of images and smaller icons to use on our website to represent our business and services.
Business proposition (work in progress): 

We take complicated and turn it into simple


Detailed requirements: 

Following the brand book (colours/fonts etc) we’d like the following
Main images: 

1. The Data Shed – noise in, clean data out (basically what you’ve already done)
2. Single customer view – linking everything your customer is doing to the same person so you can see everything about them in one place.
3. Analysis tools & dashboards
Icons:
1. Shed
2. Single customer view
3. Analysis
4. Hosting
5. Integration
6. Apps
7. Database
8. Consultation 

We also need: 

Arrows, action button (click here) for the site and 2-3 styles of frame (to put round text in presentations that kind of thing) 

I would also like to make a background from the logo – so overlaid circles repeating for things like the backs of business cards/comps slips etc

Styling and design: 


Simple, chunky, clean lines, don’t go completely crazy with the orange! Add another colour to the palate if needs be – maybe a lime green? We don’t want to look dry and boring but we have to appear professional and business like while being accessible and friendly.
We’re a technology company using cutting edge software to offer very new solutions. Think google rather than IBM. We’re really pleased with the style you’ve used so far – just maybe look at paring back on the orange!