I’m a great believer in the importance of conceptual thinking when creating new products or designing new systems. By that I mean defining ideas and notions that can help frame the why, what and how of bringing a product to life.
They focus the vision, giving innovation a rudder to steer by. Sometimes these concepts are created upfront and laid out in detailed strategy models, in other instances they start loose and coalesce as the project unfolds. I’ve always found the latter works best, as it’s only by working something through that you really understand it and its implications.
Over the course of researching and designing Qlik Sense, four concepts quickly established themselves. These evolved as we learned more about how people using our software behaved and how our vision aligned with their world and needs. Together they act as a philosophy to guide us and to ensure that the features and ideas we come up with fit together into a cohesive experience. One that supports our overall intention of increasing the access to and usefulness of data analytics.
Here they are:
Each of these concepts help us to ask questions and interrogate our thinking. They enable us to query our ideas from different perspectives, be it the usefulness of a capability, the impact of a requirement or the potential of a prototype.
I’ll be going into more detail on each of these over my next few posts. Stay tuned!
Photo credit: juhansonin / Foter / CC BY-SA