Constant Contact Labs Developer Blog

• Visualizing Information Posted Friday, June 4, 2010 Huan Lai 0 Comments

  

  With the massive amount of information to sort through, finding everything that you need becomes a difficult and tedious task, especially when that information is dispersed across several different places. Alongside the data mining project that we are currently working on, the problem of contact management has always intrigued us. With some of our customers having well over 25,000 contacts being managed by Constant Contact, and most likely even more information about these contacts and others spread out amongst several other mediums, there had to be a better way to do things, to easily extract valuable information out of that.

  Arguably, the best way to convey information in layman’s terms is by using visual representations of the data. I’ve spent some time during the last few days looking at different ways to visualize data, with some pretty interesting ways here. There are some cool ideas on that that I think can be used as inspiration to improve contact management.

  Another tool that I looked at was Pivot by Microsoft Live Labs. The TED Talk provides a very good demonstration of what Pivot can do. While Pivot itself isn’t the solution that I was looking for, the intuitive way they handle filtering and drilling down on information presents us with some good ideas.

  As a result of this experiment, I would like to develop a relatively simplistic application that would enable our customers to quickly see all of their contacts and their similarities and differences, allowing for easy targeted marketing. As it stands, we don’t collect very detailed information about contacts, often nothing but their email address and name. A contact manager isn’t very useful if that is all it could deal with. Luckily there are services, like rapleaf that can allow us to peruse through the different social networks and dig for even more information. By combining all of this information with any additional information that our customers have on their contacts, we can build a one-stop-shop that can not only consolidate information, but also make it that much more accessible.

   

  The opinions expressed here represent those of the author and not those of Constant Contact, Inc. Read Blog Terms

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  Data Management • Interface Design • Social Networks
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