Welcome to Argus Insights!
Argus Insights is a young firm with an old soul. Our goal is nothing less than to provide innovators the tools and evidence they need to keep poor products and services from ever reaching the hands of consumers. This all started as an attempt to understand the connection between good design and good business. I was looking for objective ways to measure good design, more specifically the relationship between the designed experience (product or service) and the user. Most methods use expert juries to subjective assess good design over bad. Seeking an objective measure or at least a valid subjective measure, I turned to using social media to see how the actual users viewed the product. This turned out to be a valuable insight. Not only are increasing numbers of people sharing they delights and disappointments, but it turns out, from a statistical standpoint, the combination of comment frequency and sentiment is a pretty good predictor of future revenues. In hindsight it makes sense, the more people love something today, the higher the chance you’ll sell more tomor
row. Contrast this with the mad scramble to measure market share, which not only takes weeks to determine within any reasonable accuracy but also is a lagging indicator, meaning it describes the past which has little bearing on the future. Mindshare, on the other hand, does have an ability to let you peek around the corner into the future.
Over the past couple of years we have taken these initial insights and forged them into a growing set of Experience Analytics tools and methods. Right now the tools are in an alpha state. We are using them internally to perform market intelligence work for clients. Recently we launched the beta of our reporting function. The first report focuses on the iPad 2 launch. Starting with the tablet space but soon expanding to Smartphones and other market segments, we are publishing Experience Analytics reports on products of note at a regular interval. In the near future you see more about the tools we’ve been developing and the plans we have to put these tools in to YOUR hands.
Cheers,
John