NOW.CX and the chart problem or liberalising the access and use of statistical data

Articles, blogs or presentations all depend on the quality of stories you tell.

Many stories tell themselves more convincingly if they can be visually supplemented with a few "quick" charts or statistical calculations. This may sound simple, but it's not always so.

How long would it take you to turn this data sheet into a chart?

It is not missing data that stands in the way of a round story. It is the charts themselves that are simply omitted because their production is too complex (from any statistical calculations later).

Despite the availability of massive computing power at almost every workstation, transforming a short series of data into a chart quickly turns into a tormenting tour through the most diverse utilities/programming tools, and can often only be accomplished across departments with collegial support.

A monstrous effort for a small graphic, which however decides whether the story can be told to the end, whether it convinces the reader.

What to do? Do we sacrifice the graphic to the supposedly fateful complexity? Or do we just leave it out? Are we leaving our readers alone with an unfinished story?

It remains to be mentioned that it can also be a little more complicated, like this:

• The prices for gold, silver and platinum for the last few years have been emailed to you by a colleague, but which of the three precious metals has performed relatively best since 2008?

• The data is on your computer, but you would have liked to calculate its growth rate?

• Or how about a small forecast for the next one or two years?

Every story begins with an idea. So is the story of NOW:

After many discussions with customers last year, it was clear that DSI not only had to solve the "chart problem", but also enable immediate statistical analyses.

The solution is called NOW.CX.

NOW stands for "here and now at the touch of a button": immediate display of data in charts, immediate statistical standard calculations (conversion into indices, rates of change, forecasts).

The "touch of a button" is also to be taken literally: All NOW functions are arranged in such a way that they can be selected without fumbling and searching, so to speak "touchscreen-optimised".

And then there is Christmas Island: the “CX” domain was still available, ok, but at DSI “CX” also stands for Customer Experience. And NOW is inconceivable without “CX”, without decades of close feedback with our customers.

We already notice that NOW is liberalising the access and use of statistical data. It is a simpler tool than Excel, Google Sheets or SPSS and can do without programming knowledge, e.g. in "R" or "Python".

Nevertheless, it offers the users a professional look of their charts (if requested with own branding) and supports directly on site a first, fast, uncomplicated statistical data evaluation.

In the end, the feedback was already so convincing in the beta phase that NOW is also used in all AllThatStats licenses.

And don't forget Christmas Island: if you miss a function to tell your stories even better, we'll implement it.