blogRivalMap - Strong Design
11 January 2008Released last month, RivalMap is web-based, enterprise software for the management of market & competitive intelligence. It’s of potential interest to those outside the realm of market & competitive intelligence because of its design. It illustrates well thought-out decisions regarding information management aspects important to any system that allows users to collect, organize, and collaborate around business-oriented content:
Unstructured Wiki - RivalMap’s Competitor editor is a good example of handling the challenge of integrating unstructured wiki content with interfaces to the important structured data as well.
Customized Views (Workspaces) - the user has access to multiple, customized views of the system. This is a very powerful for macro-organizing at the level of the various roles and experiences a user may have. In RivalMap, the workspaces appear to be owned by a central administrator, but it may also allow users to create and modify.
Information Retrieval and Discovery - RivalMap wraps the following capabilities into a straightforward, consistently available sidebar filter (some also appear usefully across the top on some pages, in popups, etc)
- Faceted Navigation: Relevant items or categories for the primary dimensions (Customers, Competitors, etc.) are all displayed simultaneously with parenthesized counts.
- Flexible Tags & Labels: The user’s ability to apply his own classifications, organization, and description is quite strong, with support for custom tags and possibly other kinds of labeling and annotation.
- Search-box Navigation: RivalMap makes smart use of auto-complete in the search box to allow for pull-down selection in addition to search.
Infrastructure - It’s important to note that the features above aren’t possible without the right information underpinnings. Even without knowledge of the specifics of RivalMap’s system, it’s clear that the data models and relational machinery have to be flexible enough to establish, maintain, and resolve nuanced relationships between a wide variety of objects with unforeseen characteristics.
A defining characteristic of this kind of application is that it combines: 1.powerful collaborative capabilities for organizing, and discovering information, with: 2. substantial collaborative process or workflow. The fundamental engineering trade-off between power and simplicity is critical to this kind of application, and the RivalMap design team appear to have handled this challenge well.
Mark
——-
Reference:
RivalMap.com - Website, Blog, Demo Video, etc.
Techcrunch Article on RivalMap
