Four years ago my boss and I set out to create a new team focused on building data apps. We were tired of working within the box of our enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) tools. Visualizations were already commoditized and web application development was never easier. Our plan was to build custom dashboards with well crafted UX and UI for the most popular datasets.
We called this the Big Data Apps team. We barely got off the ground. We were early and our positioning was confusing. Soon after, my boss would go on to bigger and better things, and I would go onto launch a data startup.
Fast forward to today, and I’m building “big data apps.” We just call them Custom Visualizations. I think this branding doesn’t scale well either. It implies that we are building a handful of bespoke charts. However, the visualizations that we’re actually building are much more than that. We have state, navigation, animation, visualizations, cascading interactions, and much more.
Custom Visualizations are fully formed web applications in the big data domain.
Read my previous article on when and why you should build a Custom Visualization.
