In 2011, SAP SuccessFactors was updating the design of several features in their suite of business products, and asked me to come in and provide some concepts from outside the industry.

With fresh eyes, I worked with the team to create not just another dashboard of charts and graphs, but something that actually helped to decipher issues that might exist in large organizations, and bubble those up to the right people, in the form of a newspaper-headline-like presentation.

This became Headlines.

My thinking was straightforward: we’ve been told that graphs and charts are a good way of boiling-down information to be easily digested. But with the infographics craze going on at that time, I really felt we making users do a lot of work to decipher what could be simple-to-explain problems. This lead me to the simple question I asked the data analyst: “can you explain that to me in English?”.

This resulted in in the creation of algorithms that converted data back into human-readable sentences that told you clearly what issues might be surfacing in your organization. Several patents were awarded around this approach and still stands as one of SAP SuccessFactor’s unique products.