One product, and only analysts could use it.
NetBase Enterprise could process billions of posts and slice sentiment a hundred ways — and that was exactly the problem. It was so dense that the analysts who ran it couldn’t hand anything off. Every marketer, PR lead, or executive who wanted a number routed it back through the analyst, every time.
Between “too simple” and Enterprise sat a whole product.
We first shipped the far extreme — Instant Search, one Google-style box that returned basic analytics with no learning curve. Users validated the idea and then told us, specifically, it was too simple: they wanted to share Enterprise-grade data across a team and see it in modern visualizations. Somewhere between that box and the full Enterprise suite was the product we actually needed.
A mid-tier product that respected non-analysts — without insulting the data.
Pro had to clear three bars at once: easy enough for a non-analyst to self-serve, powerful enough to leverage everything already living in Enterprise, and built for companion mode— so departmental users answer their own questions and analysts stop being everyone’s data concierge.
How research turned “make it simpler” into a shipped product.
Fourteen participants across five companies, five personas, and one hard-won lesson — plus the stakeholder politics of getting access to users at all. Every feature Pro shipped traced back to what these users told us they needed.
The full research story — sample design, personas, competitive analysis, and what it bought:
Read more about the ResearchA modular card system that scaled with the product.
From a skunkworks search box to a full dashboard — I designed the card concept, filter and search, and the Compare view, taking Pro idea-to-launch as lead designer. The craft was in a surface that stayed approachable for non-analysts while leaving room to grow for years.
The design story — the dashboard, the modular cards, the wireframe-to-final progression:
Read more about the DesignIt shipped — idea to launch, and still selling.
Instant Search — the “too simple” extreme — was validated at the company’s first user conference and adopted: the client who asked for it got it, and it was folded into the product line. NetBase Pro I designed end-to-end, through the full product and development lifecycle. It ran a large-scale beta with users from three Fortune 500 companies through a dedicated beta forum, which fed the enhancements that followed — simplified UI patterns, revised visualization colors, and the Compare feature — then went to market, where it still sells.
“Too simple” is not the answer either.
When a user says “make it easier,” the temptation is to strip everything away — and we did, all the way to one search box. The product lives in the middle, and you only find it by shipping the extreme, listening honestly when users say you overshot, and building the next thing on what they actually said.
When a user says “make it simpler,” don’t sprint to the extreme. The product lives in the middle.
A skunkworks search box became a shipping, still-selling mid-tier product — through a large-scale beta with three Fortune 500 companies — because we found the middle instead of sprinting to the extreme.