How we created a human analytics platform for teams instead of using Google Sheets

TORONTO - Feb. 4, 2021 - PRLog -- Vital - A human analytics platform, currently in the MVP stage. With Vital, you can track your personal data such as book readings, time spending, daily vices, and rituals. The platform makes data tracking social with teams engaging and commenting. It also provides a simple visualization of your data and data analytics that helps people to understand their feelings and behaviors better.

The datarockets team built this platform from scratch and participated in the product strategy, which resulted in several features that have been implemented & adopted.

Challenge

The ultimate goal of VITAL is to improve individual productivity and increase self-awareness when working with teams. Our client, the Pixel Dreams team, started with simple journaling using Google Spreadsheets in order to validate their concept. They started logging their productivity on a daily basis as well as the factors that influenced this intending to try to find correlations between their personal data and the entries of their teammates.

The guys have already proved to themselves that their data was valuable but they were struggling a lot with the spreadsheets. It took hours of work to set up spreadsheets for new members as well as initiate data entry for new time periods. Moreover, the spreadsheet solution wasn't scalable at all and it wasn't possible to share VITAL's ideas with new people while the application was based on spreadsheets. So, we had to solve the following 2 challenges:

1. Making the data entry process more convenient
2. Providing value from data entry to teams - giving some motivation to fill in data every day

During the whole development process, 1 part-time Project Manager and 2 full-time middle engineers (frontend and backend) were working from the datarockets side. The PM was involved in the product strategy discussion apart from managing the dev team. Our engineering team participated in feature discussions and suggested ways to make things simpler/faster.

Currently, VITAL is in closed BETA. Together with Pixel Dreams, we are evaluating different business models in order to find a product-market fit and define what improvements we are going to build next.

On the whole, the MVP building process with the implementation of new features and a mobile web app took us 18 weeks (~4.5 months) of development.

Read about our approach and results here: https://datarockets.com/case-studies/vital/
More about custom software development: https://datarockets.com/capabilities/