Development of Corporate Analytics Service Interface

It all starts with gathering requirements, which outline the tasks and goals of the product, for example, to reduce equipment downtime. Accordingly, the business analyst needs to determine how this will be achieved, which metrics need to be monitored, with what frequency, and in what granularity.

Then it is determined in what form this information can be presented – there are several criteria for this:

Custom development of corporate analytics services undoubtedly involves constant interaction with the client, who translates business requirements into the final product. The technical specification often includes not only design wishes and analysis of information with clear charts but also a focus on the products that the client used before the need for an individual product arose. These could have been off-the-shelf solutions or a whole system of various programs (for example, 1C, Excel, paper media) – that is, a large amount of disparate data requiring constant calculations and analysis.

After that, drafts from analysts are born: how the data will be arranged, filters - simple blocks without details, colors. This layout is agreed with the client, then handed over to the designer.

An important aspect of the designer’s work on analytics services is understanding the project logic, which is introduced either by analysts or, if possible, directly with the client.

Analysts and designers already understand what the interface developer can and cannot implement, but often during the design process, specialists have dialogues and consult on how to best reflect a particular function with the least time and effort.

The main nuance lies in the large amount of business logic (Business logic in information systems development is the set of rules, principles, and dependencies of the behavior of domain objects) in the technical specification, which is not only processed by the server but also directly displayed on the user interface. For example, the role structure of the service – which implies changes in the interface depending on the number of user "rights", as well as the possibility of dynamic changes by the user (adding new windows, graphs, cells, and values independently).

The chosen tools also play an important role in the analytics service project, namely frameworks, code libraries, architectural solutions, and importantly – the composition of the team. Data visualization is a link between tools and logic, it is important for competent analytics and easy perception of the data array processed by the server part of the project.

Almost all of the above aspects are important for any custom development, and the main difference can be called the project logic; to create a quality service, it is necessary to fully immerse oneself in the client’s business processes.