Case study
Turning noisy social media data into actionable insight for risk analysts
Project overview
Pendulum is a Seattle-based SaaS platform designed to transform how risk analysts identify, evaluate, and predict potential threats through real-time data analytics.
The Pendulum platform uses advanced AI-driven technology to collect, store, and analyze billions of content pieces from multiple social media platforms, even if they are removed from the original source.
While this vast collection of data provides invaluable insights, it also introduces complexity, often leading to a messy and overwhelming experience for users.
Project brief
Pendulum was having trouble getting new customers onboard. They wanted to improve their user experience and simplify product development.
Our first job seemed straightforward enough: do a UX audit and talk with users to spot the biggest pain points. But it quickly became clear that a major redesign of the existing platform was needed.
Research
Before jumping into user interviews, we took a step back to understand the current product better. Together with key stakeholders we defined the main user roles, mapped out key user flows, and identified areas that needed improvement.
We then ran a series of user interviews to better understand how risk analysts work and what challenges they face, and followed up with moderated usability tests to see how key users handled everyday tasks in the current version of the platform.
What are we dealing with?
- We discovered that Pendulum has standout features like Power Insights and RiskWand that could really boost the user experience and even help attract new users.
- The problem? These features are buried deep in the navigation and hard to discover.
- On top of that, the UX around key features was often confusing, making it harder for users to understand the value of the platform.
Some things we shipped
To put users in the driver's seat, we introduced drag-and-drop dashboards. Analysts can pick the widgets they care about — charts, maps, tables — arrange them in seconds, and save or share a view that matches each project's needs.
To help analysts see patterns fast, we built 3D Landscapes of Risk. It turns raw threat data into an interactive map:
- Each peak shows a risk — its height reflects volume of posts, its colour shows severity.
- Clusters reveal how threats connect, so hotspots jump out at a glance.
- Users can pan, zoom, and drill down to move from "What's going on?" to "What should we do?" in seconds.
We made sure that all the relevant insights about the topic or person of interest are always one click away. Users can dissect the narrative and find the interesting conversations even inside viral topics and large-content data.
Outcomes
By focusing on improving key features and simplifying complex workflows, we've enabled Pendulum to successfully expand their product offering to a new category of users: communication professionals and brand analytics.
Despite stronger competition in this space, new enhanced capabilities have provided Pendulum with unique offerings that differentiate them from competitors.
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