Usability

One of the things that we at Capitalytics noticed early on, and had noted in our conversations with bankers, was the difficulty in using websites that currently post public data. It is not terribly surprising giving the obligation that these services have for producing public data, and the resources with which they have to work, that user experience and the ability to easily integrate information for their users is not the first priority for these services.

On the other hand, from working with other web-based services, we have learned that User Interface design is one of the most important aspects that we have tried to integrate into using our service. User Interface ranges from not only the design of every web page, to understanding each activity that a user performs, to understanding the high level questions that a user needs answered.

In order to take advantage of the maximum amount of reusable tools, Capitalytics leverages the latest versions of the jQuery library. jQuery offers a well tested set of cross-browser tools that ensures a very robust experience for all of our users. In cases that certain functions are not offered by jQuery, though, we don't sacrifice the needs of our users; we simply end up adapting our testing to provide the assurances that our Javascript based functions are completely reliable.

Additionally, our back-end functionality has been carefully developed to ensure rapid response time to user queries. Our databases (and their indexes) have been developed to perform well under load, specifically targeting that all of our reports be able to be generated in under ten seconds under heavily loaded conditions. Our databases may not be fully normalized, and certain values may be pre-computed in order to improve the speed with which reports are rendered, but sacrificing the academic cleanliness of a databases in order to ensure our site's performance is a compromise that we have found is well worth the investment.

Finally, we run automated processes to check the security and speed of answering user's requests. And, while we do rely on these logs and our own judgment, we ultimately count on feedback from our users in order to make sure that we are providing a valuable and usable service. We place a form on every one of our webpages (that collapsible form at the bottom of every page marked "Submit Feedback about This Page to Capitalytics") that invites feedback from our users. And we take every piece of feedback very seriously -- try us! We'd love to hear from you. After all, like any other service, we are looking to provide value to every one of our users, and, without that value, we would all be doing something else! So please contact us if there's anything that we can do to make our service better!