Background

A few months before the start of the 2014 World Cup, Jon Mead, Rittman Mead's CEO, asked me to come up with a way to showcase our strengths and skills while leveraging the excitement generated by the World Cup. With this in mind, my colleague Pete Tamisin and I decided to create our own game-tracking page for World Cup matches, similar to the ones you see on popular sports websites like ESPN and CBSSports, with one caveat: we would build the game-tracker inside an OBIEE dashboard.

Unfortunately, after several long nights and weekends, we weren’t able to come up with something we were satisfied with, but we learned tons along the way and kept a lot of the content we created for future use. That future use came several months later when we decided to create our own soccer match (“The Rittman Mead Cup”) and build a game-tracking dashboard that would support this match. We then had the pleasure to present our work in a few industry conferences, like the BI Forum in Atlanta and KScope in Hollywood, Florida.

GaOUG Tech Day

Recently I had the privilege of delivering that presentation one last time, at Georgia Oracle Users Group's Tech Day 2016. With the right amount of silliness (yes, The Rittman Mead cup was played/acted by our own employees), this presentation allowed us to discuss with the audience our approach to designing a “sticky” application; meaning, an application that users and consumers will not only find useful, but also enjoyable, increasing the chances they will return to and use the application.

We live in an era where nice, fun, pretty applications are commonplace, and our audience expects the same from their business applications. Validating the numbers on the dashboard is no longer enough. We need to be able to present that data in an attractive, intuitive, and captivating way. So, throughout the presentation, I discussed with the audience the thoughtful approach we used when designing our game-tracking page. We focused mainly on the following topics: Serving Our Consumers; Making Life Easier for Our Designers, Modelers, and Analysts; and Promoting Process and Collaboration (the latter can be accomplished with our ChitChat application). Our job would have been a lot easier if ChitChat were available when we first put this presentation together....

Finally, you can find the slides for the presentation here. Please add your comments and questions below. There are usually multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing, so I'd be grateful to hear how you guys are creating "stickiness" with your users in your organizations.

Until the next time.