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Why Analytical Applications Fail

14 points by bkovitz 18y ago

SingAlong 18y ago
Cool! Its a very detailed analysis of analytical sites. Examples shown serve different fields - travel and web traffic. And even usability of analytical sites is broken down by time! That was a great read for. I am developing a set of news analysis tools and this post helps. But I am still wondering what could be done in my case? I have a totally varied set of tools. Some of them show graphs, some maps and some text data. I have separated the mashup into sub-tools. But now after reading this post, it makes me think about presenting the overview of all the types of results on the overview page like the Google Analytics dashboard. Then, I still have to think about users with slow internet connections, since the page load time might increase (and there might be time out errors from my servers resulting in half-loaded pages).
pskomoroch 18y ago
Comparing travelocity and kayak is interesting, but the best flight scheduling interface is ITA's demo app (seems to be down right now): http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ It gives a color coded matrix of flights, and all the info is captured in one screen. I think orbitz and others use their optimizer as a backend.
- wallflower 18y ago
  This has been referenced before on News.YC; this is an interesting paper about the design and implementation of ITA's optimizer. "Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning" by Carl de Marcken (2003) http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/ITA-software-travel-complexity.pdf http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...
kingkongrevenge 18y ago
I think the target user for sites like travelocity is probably fairly inflexible in their preferences. They want higher income, price insensitive business people who specifically want from point A to point B at time X. The sites and airlines don't really want to cater to College Kid Joe who's carefully weighing his options and playing around with them to save $150. Those people just don't drive revenue.

14 points by bkovitz 18y ago

Cool! Its a very detailed analysis of analytical sites. Examples shown serve different fields - travel and web traffic. And even usability of analytical sites is broken down by time! That was a great read for. I am developing a set of news analysis tools and this post helps. But I am still wondering what could be done in my case? I have a totally varied set of tools. Some of them show graphs, some maps and some text data. I have separated the mashup into sub-tools. But now after reading this post, it makes me think about presenting the overview of all the types of results on the overview page like the Google Analytics dashboard. Then, I still have to think about users with slow internet connections, since the page load time might increase (and there might be time out errors from my servers resulting in half-loaded pages).

pskomoroch 18y ago

Comparing travelocity and kayak is interesting, but the best flight scheduling interface is ITA's demo app (seems to be down right now): http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ It gives a color coded matrix of flights, and all the info is captured in one screen. I think orbitz and others use their optimizer as a backend.

wallflower 18y ago
This has been referenced before on News.YC; this is an interesting paper about the design and implementation of ITA's optimizer. "Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning" by Carl de Marcken (2003) http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/ITA-software-travel-complexity.pdf http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...

kingkongrevenge 18y ago

I think the target user for sites like travelocity is probably fairly inflexible in their preferences. They want higher income, price insensitive business people who specifically want from point A to point B at time X. The sites and airlines don't really want to cater to College Kid Joe who's carefully weighing his options and playing around with them to save $150. Those people just don't drive revenue.