Web Intelligence and the Software Product

Web intelligence is defined by Wikipedia as “The Web intelligence is the study and research of the application of Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology on the web in order to create the next generation of products, services and frameworks based on the internet.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_intelligence

I have the feeling that this is on the horizon to be the next big leap for software products. I titled this entry very specifically to relate how I foresee the field of Web Intelligence impacting the entire industry of software products.

Online software products are created by many people, each role involves making decisions that impact the product which impact user and business alike. I see on a daily basis lots of tiny decisions being made that stick the user and business with the consequence. Lets go conservatively and with only the decisions I specifically make or witness. I make 10 decisions and see 5 decisions every day about the product, they can range from use case creation to flow creation to the specific type of interaction used. We will move forward with the very conservative number saying that 15 decisions a day are made. In 2010 there are going to be 247 working days in the year, assuming a 14 day vacation is taken. That is an ultra conservative calculation of 3,705 tiny decisions a year made that impact the user and business.

The number of tiny decisions scale with the business, so imagine if you can take the assumptions and guess work out of each decision. Currently great software is made with a great reliance on instinct to guide one through the decision making process. A company who can attract world class instinct can make a world class product. For the rest of the software companies, they are reliant on the impactful decisions of the common person with out world class instincts.

Using data to inform the daily decisions will allow anyone who is creating anything, so make properly informed decisions. The advantage of the ones with the instinct, is that they will be able to make their decisions faster; the advantage to everyone else is that they will have the ability to properly make the decisions in the first place.

I can see this impacting software in an even larger way than transforming the daily assumptions into properly informed decisions. This will have an amazing impact on the functionality and ability of software interfaces to adapt to ones usage. In a lot of ways this is a step in the direction of what I consider to be the holy grail of software design which is custom software to fit the user like a nicely tailored suit.

As this area of research travels further and further down the rabbit hole, we can expect complex models of our users. We can use the models to predict usage, flows and paths, interests, connections, purchasing decisions, social trending, and beyond. I am fantastically excited to see the massive impact that Web Intelligence has on software products of the future.