Interactions with big data analytics

Big data is useful for HCI researchers and user interface design. As one example, A/B testing is a standard practice in the usability community to help determine relative differences in user performance using different interfaces. This can help product teams discover large, real-world usability issues while supplementing laboratory techniques that tend to focus on smaller, more isolated problems. Other companies use the data more directly to modify their offerings. The online game company Zynga creates games and studies data on how its audience plays them in order to update the games immediately. The work creates a strong need to preserve institutional memory, both by tracking the origins of past decisions and by allowing repeatability across analyses. New data may well be constantly streaming in, so that the processing system needs to make decisions about which part of the stream to capture.