Just completed my first real demo, DataWizard for my company. After spending the last few days on it, I was extremely glad that it had come to an end at last. I incorporated some features the different projects that I’ve handled, went through quite a few iterations with a small focus group and I managed to learn quite a few lessons.

Some of the things are really obvious, but still I committed these silly mistakes. I guess most of these reside only as head knowledge and until I really start doing then I begin to appreciate and apply them as they should be.

1. Develop what can sell.
- One of the first and important feedbacks that I got was that the demo did not showcase what was most required. My partners have actually been planning to develop on the demo of a certain product. I guess I developed this because I had the confidence that I can come up with a prototype quickly, whereas the other would actually take some time.

2. Let the interface be as simple as possible using as little steps as possible.
- The initial interface had redundant steps, with confusing names for steps

3. Accommodate to all screen resolutions.
- One of my members in the focus group had a sleek and light laptop (which meant a small screen size) and half of the functionalities were hidden.

4. Let the running of the demo be smooth.
- I actually allowed the demo to run take as input multiple data files from a directory. However, in so doing, the way to specify the directory was confusing. In the end I scraped it and had it to just run from a single data file.

5. Provide some guidance to the user during the demo.
- The demo actually allowed users to drill down to data by clicking on the charts. This was not communicated to them well enough.

6. Brand the name of the demo properly.
- The initial name I gave was Analytics Calculator. It sparked a lot of confusion among some of my users because for one, Analytics is not a very popular word and it actually did not calculate anything. Off hand, my friend suggested that I just use a name like DataWizard. I just stuck with it.

For the first release of the demo, the overall user experience extremely poor and thus quite embarrassing. The only consolation was that it did not suffer from any technical glitches. Well, since it embarrassed me so much, it probably meant that it was not released too late. =P

Taking all the feedbacks into consideration, the demo has been very much improved though still a bit raw though. This is a screenshot of the demo:

For those that are interested in DataWizard, download DataWizard here.