VLSI is a market-research firm for the semiconductor industry, collecting thousands of data points a year providing a unique insight into the strength of the industry and the many sub-industries within it. With hundreds of clients across the world, their data helps billion dollar firms understand market strength, and shapes their spending and investment decisions. Whilst the quality of their data is unparalleled, they were not deliver it in a user friendly way.
Seeing both the opportunity for disruption and to avoid being disrupted themselves, VLSI approached us to see what they could do differently.
This was a difficult and painful process for both VLSI and their clients. For VLSI, every time they wanted to send a new data set out, they had to manually reproduce the CSV sheets, which could take up to four hours depending on the size of the dataset. Similarly, as the data was in a raw format, their clients required dedicated analysts to bring value from it, making it inaccessible to most senior and middle management until it was manipulated.
Likewise, this meant often the analysts only interacted with VLSI two or three times a year when the data was released. VLSI wanted to create a product to re-engage clients more frequently, whilst easily providing high-level stats to key decision-makers.
Using the Theodo Forge project generator, we were able to create a working staging and production environment with a functional admin interface within an hour of the project starting, with real data uploaded onto the system after three days.
Within two weeks, we had the MVP completed, which gave us time to focus on additional UI/UX upgrades, advanced filters and incorporating the feedback from user testing sessions.
Cutting manual processes from 4 hours to 15 minutes freed up time for the VLSI team to engage with their customers and target new clients. The new platform also allowed for extensive segmenting of users, enabling them to serve certain datasets to specific users. Far from the one-size-fits-none sets of the past, now users could pay for and receive data sets pertaining to their specific industry with little overhead from the VLSI team.
Similarly, the combination of intuitive UX and strong data visualisation opened up the datasets to everyone, no longer being useful to only the analysts, but accessible to senior managers too, opening up a new customer base.
"We absolutely got more than we thought we would. The speed was very good from the start, and after the first sprint, I felt really confident. Strong communication is one of the main reasons we chose you guys, and you lived up to that."
