Monday, June 15, 2015

The new UI is live :)


Finally!!! The new UI is live.  After 18 months and the gathering of thousands of useful feedback, we are getting even closer to our vision of providing a platform through which people can effortlessly access information about the markets they care about.

With this new version, we had two overarching goals: to make the information more accessible and readable, and to make our existing use cases more apparent while building a solid foundation for growth. We are anxious to hear what you think have we achieved significant progress on all fronts? Of course, our platform is still fairly young and we have many more iterations to make, but the overall look and feel will essentially stay the same. 

Make the insights more accessible:

The overwhelming feedback we got on the prior site was that, while the information was readily available, the insights were too difficult to reach. Our business users want to access insights quickly and with their existing apps.

In this context, we completely rebuilt our search result page. Instead of showing data based only on the relevance of a keyword, we now show the most important results for each specific category of information: markets, company, people, or topic.  Markets are now front and center, as this is the category people most want to see. From the search page, you can refine your search by clicking on “view all” and navigate through this content or, leverage the advanced search section.

We have also completely rebuilt our daily newsletter so that information is more readable. Our users will also get access (recommendations) to companies or markets they should be tracking based on what they are already tracking in their emails.


Focus on our main use cases:

We realized that people are using the platform in three different ways that mutually feed on each other. The first one is the one we started with. Executives want to have access to all the information about the specific markets or group of markets they care about. Highly powered but also very busy people have three main considerations:

  1. They want to be able to consume the information in less than 5 minutes before their day starts, with their tool of choice which, at this point, is mainly their email systems;
  2. They want to have 95% of the information their industry generates every day and not to miss important news. Our surveys show that the Spoke Intelligence provide 60% more news than other sources and 3 to 4 need-to-know news per week that they wouldn’t have found elsewhere;
  3. They want to get insights in addition to news without having to search for them 

The second use case is Research: our platform is being used for a lot of different research needs from identifying potential candidates for a position to fill, to tracking more granular markets for sales and marketing purposes, to finding the most successful angel investors or venture capitalists for fund raising purposes.  For all those needs, the pages accessed when hitting “view all” are the pages that people will use to browse through the content and identify news, companies, or people based on specific criteria.

Lastly, we now have consultants and companies organizing their ecosystems on the Spoke Intelligence Network, tracking entire industries without the traditionally insurmountable clutter and effectively discovering new players and innovations for the innovation they care about.


Build the foundation for Growth:


With this new platform, the opportunities to develop the platform and derive value are almost endless.  Adding browsing criteria to search through information, building mini apps so people can access the information based on the use case they need, accessing deeper insights more quickly, and adding more data sources for each specific market will be our main goals moving forward, so stay tuned as we develop the platform moving forward.

Philippe Cases
CEO Spoke Software
philippe.cases@spokesoftware.com