Product Spotlight: Palantir

Going big with big data

Halloween is tonight, and I’m going as the Government Shutdown. (Pictures to come.) By college standards, this costume is just the right balance of cleverness, effort, and aesthetics. By political standards, it’s a sign that Washington has become the butt of more than a few jokes. Lately our lawmakers look like a sloppy and disorganized hot mess—descriptors that should be reserved for tonight’s campus debauchery, not our country’s government.

Part of the government’s problem is that its data are hot messes, too. Enter Palantir, a Silicon Valley start-up that is solving the world’s most important problems by integrating large, disparate data sets. Yes, this “start-up” has been around for nearly a decade, but government moves slowly—and Palantir is just beginning to sink its teeth in Washington. Earlier this month I gave the public version of their software, AnalyzeThe.US, a try and was astonished by its potential applications. Here’s why:

Massive capabilities, modest framework

What’s incredible to me about Palantir is that even the limited, publicly-available version of their product is incredibly powerful. The company realizes that while its product is primarily marketed towards large government agencies, private corporations, and non-profits, there are use cases even for people like you and me. By making their flagship software available to the public, Palantir wins massive goodwill. We know the company’s product adds value because we can literally see the way it organizes intimidating data in an unintimidating package.

Intuitive, primitive user experience

Like products like Coursera and Flipboard, Palantir is defined by its content rather than a flashy or complicated UX. As such, the software itself is simple and accessible. That’s not to say Palantir is intuitive, per se—there is certainly a learning curve—but once learned, it makes users feel like they possess awesome superpowers. I never needed more than a few operations to do all the crazy things I wanted to do with Palantir. In short, it exemplifies one of my favorite UX principles: Software should be easy to use and easy to learn, even if it’s not necessarily “obvious.”

Democratizing data

Palantir is doing to big data what Microsoft did to productivity, what Ebay did to commerce, and what GitHub did to programming: It’s making it more accessible. Not only can the general public now easily investigate Defense Department activity or children’s hospital spending, but the people running these organizations have more access to their own data. By extending the reach of data—a tool with capabilities we haven’t even fully realized yet—Palantir follows the footsteps of some of history’s greatest tech products.