Hey, everyone. I’m Brian O’Neill and I’m excited to share my new podcast with you called Experiencing Data. I’m a consultant specializing in design and user experience for custom enterprise data products and apps. I’m also the founder and principal of Designing for Analytics.

My goal with this podcast is to expose you to you or rather to other professionals like you. Who is you? Like any good designer, I had a persona in mind when I started designing this podcast. This persona is basically, modeled on my past clients, conversations at data and analytics conferences that I’ve spoken at, and email exchanges with subscribers on my mailing list. My guest and I assume my listeners are usually going to be data product managers, engineering and analytics leaders, data scientists, and executives.

Regardless of the title though, Experiencing Data is really a podcast for business leaders responsible for turning data into useful, usable, and valuable decision support via custom software applications.

Maybe you’re wondering why I’m doing this and I am too a little bit. But here is why, I believe the success of analytics software and data products intended for people, since some of them obviously, don’t have interfaces as many of you probably know is, products that are intended for people are only as good as the experiences that they afford, sometimes I refer to that as kind of the last mile of this large technology projects and products that we put out. Because not all companies have trained designers and UX professionals on staff, I was curious to learn how my guests consider user experience as they design these enterprise data products and software tools.

On this podcast, we’re not going to go deep on design implementation topics such as data viz and user interface design, some of these things are inherently visual, and I think reading about them and seeing examples is more relevant. But more importantly, I want to look more broadly at what I sometimes call Capital D Design. Capital D Design looks more at defining business objectives, user needs, the problem spaces especially, and the success criteria for new products and services.

We’re also going to stay clear off heavy technology discussions since there’s already plenty of that kind of stuff out there and that’s not my area of expertise. Also, on occasion, I may record some solo episodes and share some of my insights on designs that you can put them into play in your daily work. If you’re looking for this kind of insight on a regular basis, you can head over to my Insights mailing list which is at designingforanalytics.com. I write pretty regularly to my list. Feel free to subscribe there if you’re interested in learning more about designing UX.

I’m also a professional percussionist. I’m a professional musician and performing artist. In addition to my design consulting work that I do, I wanted to find a way to bring my two worlds together. I’m going to have occasional episodes with music technologies when it’s relevant to Experiencing Data.

To kick that off, we’re going to have an upcoming episode featuring a guest who’s a product manager, and his name is Julien Benatar, he’s over at Pandora which I’m sure many of you know. He’s going to come in and talk about how Pandora has gone about designing their services analytics platform which is called Next Big Sound, so looking forward to that one. I hope you will be too.

One of the things about podcasting, in general, is ironically how few analytics, we, the publishers and the producers and hosts, receive about our listeners. As those of you on my mailing list already know, I routinely going out and interviewing your customers on a one-on-one fashion; customers, users, whether they’re paying for your software or using an internal tool, I really advocate going out to uncover latent problems they’re having and latent needs that may not be necessarily expressed.

But since the podcast environment though doesn’t let me eat my own dog food and do this type of research since we’re kind of in a one-way broadcast modality, with me speaking and you listening, I hope you’ll leave me feedback, either in iTunes or via email. You can reach me at [email protected]. This show is my MVP, and I’m sure this show may change over time. If you don’t know what an MVP is, well, stay tuned because we will probably cover that as well.

If this show sounds interesting to you, please head over to iTunes or your favorite podcast app, and click the subscribe button, and then you can join my mailing list at designingforanalytics.com/podcast. That page will be the homepage for this show. Thanks again. I’m Brian O’Neill and welcome to Experiencing Data.