Thomson Reuters: Product reimagination for visual analytics

Thomson Reuters has long been a leader in providing services for aggregating, organizing and analyzing scholarly publication data. In continuing its leadership position, Thomson Reuters recently developed a new product, InCites, which is intended to offer advanced analytics for university administrators and funding agencies to further set itself apart from the competition. The data behind InCites is world class, but the presentation of the information and product workflow has yet to reach its maximum potential.

Thomson Reuters engaged Datascope for a one-week “elaboration phase” workshop at their offices where we engaged people from sales, design, development and management roles to discuss the future of the InCites product. Beginning with Thomson Reuters team’s deep understanding of their customers and their needs, we brainstormed a suite of InCites user personas and their corresponding use cases to better understand what would ideally be required of an advanced analytics product.

These discussions helped guide our development and design of a short- and long-term redesign for the InCites product. Our short-term, “quick wins” design was geared toward keeping the overall layout and workflow of the existing product the same, but redesigning the reports to be much more visual and accessible, with gory details available on demand. The idea is that these quick wins would give the InCites team the ability to modernize the look of the InCites product without a large-scale investment in a new product altogether. Our long-term, “revamped” design was geared toward reimagining how a simpler, more elegant, and more dynamic design could cover each use case in a much more streamlined fashion by building on the quick wins solutions. As a deliverable from the workshop, we provided a detailed action plan about how our proposed implementations will improve the Thomson Reuters product in the short- and long-term.

As our business has become progressively more geared toward the creative development of data-driven solutions, these “elaboration phase” workshops have started to become a staple of our primary offering. These elaboration phase workshops give all stakeholders an opportunity to provide input and result in a clear roadmap on top of which we can develop useful and usable data-driven products.