What would you do with all the answers and 12 hours of spare time?
Let us begin with a simple conceit: I want you to have all the answers.
I want you to be able to rattle off well educated and useful figures about the demographics of a neighborhood, the commute times / mode-shares and specificities of the ridership in a transit service area, the projected populations of a small boomtown in your metro, and the economic conditions of a proposed retail site. I obsess over these things, losing sleep over whether you know the baby boomer population of your next project site or the average home value of your proposed special tax district.
Don’t believe me? I spent last week (mostly traveling from site to site in a cramped rental car with two homesick and often utterly unagreeable colleagues in bumper to bumper 12-lane highway traffic) listening to the people who need these answers most describe their problems, their work flow, and their critiques on my work.
I want all of the above and more for you and I want it bad.
Great ideas must be taken to their conclusion
A few weeks ago, a colleague (this one I wasn’t trapped in a rental car with) was lamenting that his subscription to Blue Apron (a service that packages and ships ingredients for high quality home cooked meals to your door) was not quite what he really wanted. The service still required him to actually prepare the meal they had sent to him (and run the dishwasher eventually) and the difference between only having to do a bit of the work in making a meal and not having to do anything was actually quite vast.
I hit him with a *zinger* about how there was this new service called “restaurants” that would not only choose and gather the ingredients for your meal but also prepare it, walk it over to you, provide utensils and place setting, and clean up afterwards.
At this juncture my mind paused while a line formed to high-five me for that sick burn…
It would occur to me during my trip last week that in some ways, one of our products had become the Blue Apron of gathering, analyzing, and meaningfully sharing the answers to a community’s great questions. We had taken a great idea half way and our clients and prospects were letting us know this by saying things like, “I’m really excited about what I can do with this, I have a busy schedule though.”
A dining experience for busy decision makers who need answers
When you go to a restaurant, you usually don’t want to be pestered with questions about the intricacies of the meal preparation. Some pickier eaters might differ on that point but all would agree that if the chef sent your server out with a pad of paper and asked you to write down the quantity and arrangement of every ingredient to be included in the meal and an outline of preparation instructions, you’d be concerned enough to leave.
Why should serving you with answers (that, if you’ll take a moment to recollect, I VERY much want you to have) be any different?
We started moving toward a fine-dining-like paradigm of “high quality information meals brought to your table” with Introducing mySidewalk’s Template Library.
When we started building mySidewalk our focus was two-fold: 1) become a rich and reliable resource for public datasets…medium.com
This idea expanded in Empower Local Elected Officials With Data.
A good elected official personifies his or her district. They know the stories of a place and can use them to…medium.com
But on the flight back last week, I still felt anxious about whether the level of service we were offering was more like Blue Apron or more like the excellent, high-end restaurant experience I want your answers to be served within.
As it turned out, serendipity had a special gift for me Monday morning during the weekly demo (this demo allows our engineers to show off what they built that is being released that night; it serves as a rich source of internal release notes, a Q&A session, a very brief training, and a public speaking/presentation opportunity for young engineers). There were a glut of features and improvements that left little doubt as to the kind of answer-dining experience we were going to be offering customers from that day forward.
First up: A 250 millisecond decrease to application load time
Over time, our application had started to wait on some information it didn’t really need to wait for during the momentary blip in time between when a user decided they wanted to use our app and when they were able to get down to business. 250ms probably sounds like a small amount of time to wait once, when you first visit the app in a session, but across thousands of users, milliseconds add up to seconds. And those are seconds where the collective “you” doesn’t have all the answers, and we already covered how I feel about that…
On deck: Easy export of the current information
An extremely common series of tasks for decision makers and the heroes who provide them with answers is to locate, filter, analyze, and transform data then export it for sharing, documentation, communication, and further analysis. We now fulfill this need with trivial effort by supporting a complete and interoperable export of all the data and information you have open currently.
Export of turnover information for Dallas. Note the included age-range and home value breakdowns!docs.google.com
Batting clean-up: New map start dialogue
Our default view walking into the main interactive experience of mySidewalk used to *plop* you at a wide view of the country with no information of particular interest displayed and left you to forage through the package of fresh data that constituted our ingredients and prepare your information meal.
This left decision makers who needed answers on a deadline facing a tough trade-off: great answers I need are likely in here, but there are a lot of things that demand my attention.
To address this dilemma, we’ve added an incredibly brief start dialogue when entering the experience that asks two simple questions: “where are we interested in today?” and “what problem are we attempting to address?” (recruiting the services of the aforementioned template library). This gets you to the answers you seek right away. No panning, zooming, long searches, or formulating complex analyses (of course, you’re still welcome to poke around our information ingredients in the event that you have a very special “answer-meal” in mind).
What’s this mean to me?
Our GIS expert, Brian Parr, did a fantastic presentation for the entire team here at mySidewalk where he walked us through the steps of several real-world example problems/questions/analyses with outlines of the sub-tasks and real-time demos to help us understand the complexity and effort involved and the types of problems they solve. In his presentation, he included a slide titled simply, “Time is Money” (the point of which was driven home further by the simple, black, Arial text on a white background of the slide) describing the investment required to solve the example problems and answer the example questions. In his well informed estimation, many of the answers he demonstrated finding (that are now available at your fingertips via start dialogues, templates, dashboards, and exports) would take anyone who doesn’t do them full-time, assembly-line style upwards of 12 hours to complete.
I’m hoping to get you these same answers in minutes.
So there you have it! All the answers and 12 hours to spare. Now, what are you going to do with them?
Not a mySidewalk user yet? Let us know the answers you really crave and we’ll make a free, interactive report just for you. Submit your request here.
About the Author: Matt Barr works at mySidewalk helping to invent technology that betters our understanding of communities. Civics, democracy, computing, and the great outdoors are his passions.
