An intern from the Rutgers University Master of Quantitative Finance program was working on a data research project. Her search for publicly available data led her to the S&P indexes website – https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/index-family/equity/. After many clicks through various pages, she decided to build a better data product. Her reasoning was simple. She wanted:
(1) a simple one-click access to any index instead of having to click multiple times to switch between the different indexes web pages;
(2) a one-click comparison of two or more indexes instead of having to copy and paste the data from the S&P website into Excel to create charts; and
(3) ability to easily share her project with other students as an email attachment or link as she normally does with other projects and files.
Hence, she built her project and a data product, which can be seen here – https://storieddata.com/resources/Demo-Files/SP-Equity-Returns.html. You can also download the interactive file by clicking the download icon at the bottom right corner of the data product. For convenience, we hosted the data product file on our site.
I am sure the designers of the S&P web site will point to numerous reasons why the clicks and the many individual web pages are justified. I hear such arguments all the time and they usually boil down to the following: “What the intern did is too simple. It does not take into account…..” – the list here gets usually too long. The point of this article is precisely that the traditional IT reply is fundamentally wrong as complexity is used to reject simplicity. But ask your IT the converse: “If it is too simple why didn’t you do it this way?” After all, don’t information consumers want simplicity? Didn’t the iPhone set simplicity as the norm for everything digital? Any argument against the intern’s design would ignore what the intern wanted and what her usability goals for the project were – one click access and one click comparisons.
But there is an even more stunning question about productivity. In today’s world productivity and cost savings are top of mind concern for every executive and every manager. Thus, it is worth thinking why it took this intern just one week to build this data product. Furthermore, most of her time was wasted on copying and pasting data from the separate web pages, which any analytical user will begrudgingly have to do. One may wonder how much time it took IT to build all these separate index web pages, how much database and ETL coding went into creating the queries for each index page, what was the cost of all technologies to build and support the index web pages, and last but not least what is the cost of the infrastructure required to support thousands of people accessing the index data.
Would the intern replace the S&P IT department that built the index application? Definitely not! But can IT get fresh ideas from the intern, can their thinking be challenged, can they learn something new? Definitely yes! And if you wonder which design is more useful – do an A/B testing and let the users decide if they want a multi-page site or a one-pager data product. But I would argue that everyone who needs to compare and share will prefer the data product.
Let us learn from the digitally natives by giving them the opportunity to show us.
To learn more about how to create interactive bank statements, contact us.
Dr. Rado