009 - Nancy Hensley (Chief Digital Officer, IBM Analytics) on the role of design and UX in modernizing analytics tools as old as 50 years

Nancy Hensley is the Chief Digital Officer for IBM Analytics, a multi-billion dollar IBM software business focused on helping customers transform their companies with data science and analytics. Nancy has over 20 years of experience working in the data business in many facets from development, product management, sales, and marketing.

Today’s episode is probably going to appeal to those of you in product management or working on SAAS/cloud analytics tools. It is a bit different than our previous episodes in that we focused a lot on what “big blue” is doing to simplify its analytics suite as well as facilitating access to those tools. IBM has many different analytics-related products and they rely on good design to make sure that there is a consistent feel and experience across the suite, whether it’s Watson, statistics, or modeling tools. She also talked about how central user experience is to making IBM’s tools more cloud-like (try/buy online) vs. forcing customers to go through a traditional enterprise salesperson.

If you’ve got a “dated” analytics product or service that is hard to use or feels very “enterprisey” (in that not-so-good way), then I think you’ll enjoy the “modernization” theme of this episode. We covered:

• How Nancy is taking a 50-year old product such as SPSS and making it relevant and accessible for an audience that is 60% under 25 years of age
• The two components Nancy’s team looks at when designing an analytics product
• What “Metrics Monday” is all about at IBM Analytics
• How IBM follows-up with customers, communicates with legacy users, and how the digital market has changed consumption models
• Nancy’s thoughts on growth hacking and the role of simplification
• Why you should always consider product-market fit first and Nancy’s ideas on MVPs
• The role design plays in successful onboarding customers into IBM Analytics’ tools and what Brian refers to as the “honeymoon” experience

Resources and Links:

Nancy Hensley on Twitter

Nancy Hensley on LinkedIn

Quotes:

“It’s really never about whether it’s a great product. It’s about whether the client thinks it’s great when they start using it.” –Nancy

“Every time we add to the tool, we’re effectively reducing the simplicity of everything else around it.”–Brian

“The design part of it for us is so eye-opening, because again, we’ve built a lot of best in class enterprise products for years and as we shift into this digital go-to-market, it is all about the experience…”–Nancy

“Filling in that “why” piece is really important if you’re going to start changing design because you may not really understand the reasons someone’s abandoning.”–Brian

“Because a lot of our products weren’t born in the cloud originally, they weren’t born to be digitally originally, doesn’t mean they can’t be digitally consumed. We just have to really focus on the experience and one of those things is onboarding.” –Nancy

“If they [users] can’t figure out how to jump in and use the product, we’re not nailing it. It doesn’t matter how great the product is, if they can’t figure out how to effectively interact with it. –Nancy