First class UI/UX for dates/times vs. using filter in Analyze

A thread of wanting to easily filter data on dates and times as surfaced on account setup calls. We know technically filters can get you most of the way there, but from a UX perspective this sucks in comparison to having a dedicated UI for defining date and time windows for the data.

• potentially scope across UIs vs. just in Analyze

Next Steps

• @iroussos Find out what the "timeframes" functionality does and write a comment explaining or a YouTube video
• @dmor fill out exploratory sprint questions
• @dmor respond to Douwe's question

Opportunity Assessment

Summary

1. Exactly what problem will this solve? (value proposition)

Users expect to be able to set a time & date range within which to analyze their data. There are many design patterns they are familiar with in tools like Google Analytics, Excel, etc. that support this behavior by default. Currently, Meltano offer pre-bucketed windows of time such as "day", "week", "month", "year" but users want the flexibility to select more specific ranges such as 2020-01-07 to 2020-01-14.

2. For whom do we solve that problem? (target market)

All existing/potential users

3. How big is the opportunity? (market size)

Large (most users in our target persona, and even beyond) and this is a showstopper for performing basic analysis on sales calls

4. What alternatives are out there? (competitive landscape)

Export data to spreadsheet or other data tool that supports this functionality. Most data analytics tools do.

5. Why are we best suited to pursue this? (our differentiator)

It's table stakes

6. Why now? (market window)

It is coming up frequently in customer onboarding calls, and keeping us from getting useful reports created that give users a reason to come back (MAUI)

7. How will we get this product to market? (go-to-market strategy)

@kressaty will do the usual blog/email/social promotion as part of a release

8. How will we measure success/make money from this product? (metrics/revenue strategy)

• Increased number of reports using time ranges
• Increase MAUI specifically returning to view these reports
• More successful customer onboarding calls, where we have a good response to this concern

9. What factors are critical to success? (solution requirements)

Support the ability to build a report where which data are analyzed is determined by a date range. This could be the range of the data collection (e.g. data from X date to Y date) but it is more likely to be built on the data itself, such as a timestamp like "created date" or "updated date". We should expect we will receive data sets with more than one column that contains a date, and be prepared to let the user tell us which one is the one they want to filter on.

Most MVC Solution: probably does not need to support timestamps to the hour, starting with date ranges rounding up to the day is good enough. Also, no need for sophisticated handling of time zones - just read the data as it is provided to us.

10. Given the above, what’s the recommendation? (go or no-go)

Go, with the most MVC solution possible to start off