When you have tons of data, digging in to find what it means can be a challenge—and turning your data-based stories into clear and compelling visuals can be even harder. So Adobe Researchers collaborated with the Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) team to create Project Slide Wow, an experimental prototype showcased as a Sneak at Adobe Summit.
Users can easily export data from their CJA dashboard to instantly create a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation that distills stories from the data, complete with annotated visualizations and speaker notes. They can even ask Project Slide Wow questions to get instant updates.
Adobe Research Scientist Jane Hoffswell took the stage at Adobe Summit in March, along with celebrity host Ken Jeong, to share a sneak peek of Project Slide Wow.
Bridging data analysis and creativity to build Project Slide Wow
Before amazing the Summit audience with Project Slide Wow, the Adobe Research team had already spent several years collaborating with the CJA product team on tools to help Adobe customers get the most from their data.
“We’d been thinking about how to help people understand dashboards and data for a while,” explains Hoffswell, one of the lead collaborators on Project Slide Wow. “We had developed intelligent captions in CJA, which is a feature that provides natural-language insights about data. From there, we were inspired by the needs of Adobe customers who share that data with lots of different people in different use cases. So we began thinking about bigger, sharable ways to help people talk about data.”
The product team knew that one of the main ways CJA users share data insights is through PowerPoint presentations. As a frequent PowerPoint user herself, Hoffswell was excited to explore how to make it easier for users to present data in a more creative way using PowerPoint.
“When I was first getting into computer science, data visualization was a place where I felt like I could bring out my creativity and make things that are beautiful. So that’s a big part of what I wanted to do with this project,” explains Hoffswell.
So the team set out to create a tool that would automatically analyze hundreds of insights on an analytics dashboard in CJA to determine what was most important and then offer engaging ways to highlight the ideas in a presentation.
To start, Hoffswell thought about how she usually creates presentations. She experimented with ways to pare down overly complex data representations and make them more interpretable, and she collaborated with the product team for feedback. These early experiments helped her create the automation behind Project Slide Wow.
To make the automation work for Project Slide Wow, Hoffswell developed a scoring and ranking algorithm that looks at the automatically generated insights from CJA and figures out which ones are the most important—and which fit together to tell a meaningful, data-based story.
The work drew on several discoveries from Adobe Research interns, including techniques for grouping and ordering data insights and making those processes transparent to users. “When we’re filtering the data, we want to make sure users know that some information has been filtered out. We don’t want to hide the fact that it exists, but we want to emphasize that we focused on other parts, and that there’s more data if they want to see it. It’s part of building trust with our users,” says Hoffswell.
Hoffswell and the team created a working demo of the tool that could filter and analyze data and then generate presentation slides with organized content in coherent sections with a narrative flow. They then added the ability to compare data from a previous presentation to see change over time and develop new insights about the changes.
“It happens to analysts all that time—they give a presentation and six months later someone asks, ‘How is the data looking now?’ They don’t want to have to recreate the whole presentation because it’s a difficult, time-consuming process. So we wanted users to be able to build on what they’ve done before and compare data to show what’s changed,” says Hoffswell, pointing out the huge potential time savings for users.
From Research to Summit Sneak
With all this research and development in place, the team submitted Project Slide Wow as a possible Summit Sneak—and were delighted to learn that their work was selected to be shared with the world on the Summit stage.
To prepare, they built a demo to show how users can create presentations on-the-fly. They collaborated with engineers on the user interface (UI) integrations and worked with a designer to build beautiful presentation templates. They also added a chat-based interaction to make it easy for users to ask questions about their data as they create a presentation. “Preparing Project Slide Wow for the stage was a true team effort, and presenting it was amazing,” says Hoffswell.
Project Slide Wow continued to make waves after Summit, including press coverage in Venture Beat, ZDNET, and Fox Business.
Looking ahead, Hoffswell hopes to keep building on the technology. “I think it will have a lot of value for customers and I’d love to see where it can go from here.
Key contributors
Presenter: Jane Hoffswell
Adobe Research collaborators: Victor Soares Bursztyn, Shunan Guo, and Eunyee Koh
Additional collaborators: Prithvi Bhutani, Brandon George, Trevor Paulsen, Abhisek Trivedi, Alan Wilson, and Wei Zhang
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