INNPERSPECTIVE

A Series of Industry Focused Articles
Read about the latest trends and updates in the intellectual property industry from the Innography perspective.

The Power of the UI

Saturday 11, April 2009 by Tyron Stading

The Power of the UI

I frankly don’t like mentioning our competition for lots of reasons — but I’m making an exception in this blog. I’m not going to mention them by name, but what I will say is that they don’t seem to understand the importance of the User Interface (UI).

Apple has always understood how important the UI is — because they’ve always focused on the “U” in UI: the User. I credit their success today for that very reason. From its inception, Apple has concerned itself with the user experience, beginning with the original Apple computer and most recently with the iPhone. They created things that met a market demand and made it easy for customers to use them.

It was, in fact, this philosophy that brought the PC to a whole new class of people who really didn’t care about computers and quite frankly thought they had no use for them. Today, this same class of people probably couldn’t imagine life without their Mac or their iPod.

That philosophy of embracing the user experience has been paramount to me since I set out to build a better mouse trap. As an inventor at IBM, I saw individuals struggle at the company as they tried to cope with large patent pools and the peripheral issues such as licensing and litigation that accompany them. In my mind, the key to successfully managing those things is how the data is acquired, represented and visualized by the users tasked with that purpose.

A renowned information visualization expert, Dr. Edward Tufte, once said “I think it is important for software to avoid imposing a cognitive style on workers and their work.” This notion is exactly what I’ve tried to build into our product from the ground up — a way to make the tool work for the user rather than expecting the user to work for the tool.

Unfortunately for the market, our competition has not embraced this philosophy as readily. As a matter of fact, they are still using UI technology from the ‘90s. And while that might have been fine 15 years ago, it suggests that they aren’t really focused on ensuring a positive customer experience. To me, the user experience is really our primary mission.

Here are the essential problems that I see with the UIs for most products on the market today — problems we’ve tried very hard to avoid.

First, they force complex Boolean queries. It’s not that they don’t work; it’s that they make you work too hard. The primary focus for users of these tools is constructing complex Boolean search strings, which Innography supports — but which you aren’t forced to use. For example, drilling into a specific company should be a single click instead of a complex series of company names. Conducting patent research in that way is challenging and it’s also distracting. The user’s focus becomes the search preparation rather than analyzing and using the results.

Another problem is the lack of collaborative tools. Sharing the information becomes a completely separate process rather than an integrated part of the research. Customers need a process in which they have the capability to share data as they accumulate it in real time. They need a common repository so that they can work with other team members efficiently — because efficiency often breeds effectiveness.

The speed of these systems is also quite slow because of the way they’re designed. The algorithms they use are simply inefficient and don’t take advantage of computing advances in the last decade (e.g. map-reduce). It’s also worth noting that a slow system isn’t just inconvenient — it’s one more distraction.

People today have constant distractions and they need the system to be as fast as they think so they can maintain their train of thought. Waiting tens of seconds, minutes, or even hours for an answer is not an option.

To prioritize the User Interface, Innography has invested heavily in the user experience for our next release. We’ve hired incredible talent from the music industry and brought in consultants from large consumer-oriented websites. The result is a huge improvement in speed, usability, workflow productivity and user experience. While our current product is one of the easier UIs on the market, the next release breaks new ground on ease of use and user experience.

This passion for the user experience has led me to the development of what I like to call the Innography Manifesto, which comprises three basic tenets:

1) Usability is a paramount feature of the system — not an afterthought.

Just because a system has a powerful analytics and correlation engine doesn’t mean you can afford to compromise the UI or treat it as a secondary element. All that power in the engine is useless if you can’t access it easily and in context of your daily workflow.

2) Build the system around the user; don’t expect the user to accommodate what you build.

Many systems developed by our competitors were developed with an enterprise software mentality. Such systems tend to be unwieldy, hard to use and often contain a counterintuitive UI. We’ve taken an approach that is more like consumer-oriented products in the sense that we strive to keep the customer in mind from the beginning and continue to do so with every improvement.

3) Speed and collaboration are vital.

Our competitors have consistently made system speed a low priority. Our next release is being developed and user-tested with this tenet positioned as a very high priority. We also consider the ability to share and disseminate information as one of the metrics of speed. If you can’t dynamically share information with people who need it, you aren’t leveraging the full value of your research.

We’ll be announcing the new release soon.  When it is available I highly recommend you check it out so you can see the difference a user focus makes in an IP business analytics tool.


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