SpatialKey Launch

The team over at Universal Mind has just launched a private beta of their flagship product, SpatialKey, a product that I first saw a prototype of back at Adobe MAX 2007.

In about August of last year I had the privilege of being asked by some of the senior folks at Universal Mind if I would mind lending a hand in helping out with some of the UX and front end application design of SpatialKey, coming at it more from a Business Intelligence viewpoint. Since I had already invested a couple of years of my time in developing a SaaS BI offering at The Dashboard Company, this was an area I had spent a lot of time thinking about and designing a solution for. Over the course of a couple of months I worked on and off with the team to help define some of the organizational structures of the front end UI and UX.

What was really cool, is that since the team did NOT come from a BI background they had some refreshing approaches to solving the more typical enterprise application design patterns and the result was a nice blend of web 2.0 patterns supporting typical enterprise functions (users, roles, security, asset managment, etc.) For instance, the team came up with a very elegant and streamlined approach to ETL (extract-transform-load) that used a wizard driven approach to uploading, encoding, and transforming raw data into a format that SpatialKey can then use to easily create interactive reports, mappings, etc. Traditional ETL tools are usually much more complex and brittle, but from what I have seen the dev team did a great job of putting a lot of smarts into their ETL and makes a traditionally painful process super easy. I suspect Doug and his compatriots spent a wee bit of time working on that piece of it.

I was also able to work with a talented designer they had just brought on Francisco Inchauste, and we were able to collaborate a bit on the new look and feel of the application itself.

My work with UM on SpatialKey trailed off near the end of last year and the team went heads down on pushing towards a commercial release. So when Brandon Purcell, one of the team leads showed me the private beta a couple of weeks ago I was blown away. I was super impressed with not only the quality of the application, but how far they had come in such a short time period. In going through the beta there are still areas that could benefit from some UX refinement, but I think the current beta will serve as a great foundation that will allow SpatialKey to evolve into a very powerful and robust BI tool that will grow beyond just geo-spatial/temporal analysis.

Congrats to the team over at UM, what a great effort and result.

This entry was posted on March 24th, 2009 and is filed under Dashboards, Data Visualization, Software Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.