#darwin development

We have a dream. To give you an overview on all your online marketing channels. To minimize the confusion triggered by too much, or unimportant metrics. And to make it easy for you to discover which of your marketing efforts worked, and which didn't.

Our dream is rapidly becoming reality. And we would like to give you a sneak preview on our progress.

Last week was a great marketing week for Darwin. This is how our dashboard looks:

A 23% increase in our goal (website leads). Twitter performed a little worse than normal. Darwin tells me I reached more people, but not the ones who are interested in becoming a customer.

AdWords on the other hand, did a lot better. We boosted our remarketing efforts thanks to some advice from Dries. The results are great: more people saw our ads, and those people were more likely to convert. A bigger and better audience, so to speak.

This feature is live in beta, and I think it's one of the best things we have ever built. It's easy and intuitive, and provides me with a great overview on all our marketing efforts. I honestly can't wait to show you how we are making this view even more powerful.

When you are spending hours and hours digging through data, what is it that you want to find out?

We asked this question to our clients and prospects, and came to this conclusion:

We want to find out which marketing efforts lead to conversions.

With Darwin Analytics, we aim to combine and crunch all the metrics from all your marketing channels to show you just this: marketing efforts that lead to conversions.

Today, we took the next step in this direction. Previously, you were able to easily discover peaks in your conversions.

Now, you can see the post that triggered the peak in conversions:

At Darwin we strongly believe the future of analytics will be defined by both machine learning and advanced data visualization. This belief is reflected in the team we're building Darwin with: We have a data scientist on board - always wearing a white coat, two talented back-end developers, and a combination of freelance specialists in UI design & front-end development. 

We combine machine learning & data visualization for a reason: machine learning gives us the ability to combine complex data and look for un-biased insights. Advanced data-visualisation makes the end result of that machine learning comprehensible for the end-user. 

Our end goal is having an application that communicates complex insights in a natural way to our end users. We believe this is the most efficient way to communicate a maximum of information abstracted from data.

Taking the idea into practice

This mission statement is incorporated in every aspect of our visual design. It starts with our logo: a beautiful tree designed by Simon Coudeville:

The tree wasn't chosen by accident. At the time, we were reading 'What technology wants' by Kevin Kelly and 'Mastery & Mimicry' by Sep Kamvar. Two publications that highly influenced the vision of Darwin Analytics, and they both place technology in a natural/biological context.

For us, the tree clearly mimics what Darwin is doing. The roots are symbol for the way Darwin is feeding on data with API's connecting us to other measuring platforms. The tree itself is the way we interpret and translate this data in a meaningful and frictionless way to the end-user. The falling leaves stand for the actions the user is taking because of the insights gained from Darwin. And the soil the tree is standing on is constantly fed by those actions, thus impacting the way the tree is groing.

In 'Mastery & Mimicry' this is called 'Cyclicality', where every tool should nourish on what it depends. We believe this is extremely important and we try to develop Darwin aligned with these principles.

We don't know

If our aim is to create a frictionless way for users to interpret complex data, then the user is the one we should listen to. At Darwin we have a customer advisory board consisting of our most dedicated clients. In our development process, we move from wireframes to design to front-end development together with our customer advisory board, constantly testing what we're building. We call this 'validated learning'. 

We scale this validated learning process to everything we do: every design is an opportunity to learn from the way people interact with it. The learnings we get from these experiments are directly impacting the pace at which Darwin is developed. Flexibility at high speed is what makes working at Darwin so interesting.

Excellence only grows on passion

You can't be learning if you aren't failing. And you can't put up with failure after failure if you're not passionate about fixing the problem. 

Today, we're looking for a full-time designer who can fight through failure. Partly because you see opportunities where other see problems, but also because you have a passion for frictionless web applications and beautiful data visualization.