IntuiLab’s Interactive Touchscreen Toolset Now Includes Rich Data Tracking Capabilities

November 20, 2015 by Dave Haynes

The French interactive software firm IntuiLab has pushed out a new version of its IntuiFace platform – which enables people to develop touchscreen applications without having any real coding skills – that layers in what it calls enterprise-class data tracking capability.

The company, which also has an office in Boston, says IntuiFace v5.2 now addresses everything from fully customizable event capture to native integration with 150-plus analytics, marketing and data warehousing platforms. “Without any development skills,” says a company press release, “businesses can capture detailed information about user preferences and characteristics – the #1 determinant of ROI for a DOOH project – for any sized deployment.”

A key strength of interactive content is its inherent ability to capture user preferences and characteristics. People touch what interests them. With the addition of sensors for everything from geographic location and weather to gender and age distribution, a comprehensive snapshot can be taken at every signage end point. Collectively, all of this information drives deep insight about users/visitors/shoppers.

With IntuiFace, the interactive experience itself becomes a sensor. It can integrate with any data sources, business logic or connected objects, extract information from those sources in real time, and tie it in with the ongoing actions of users standing at the screen. Designers, in collaboration with the business, use the IntuiFace no-coding editor to create compelling interactive content using their own graphic media and identify the particular events that should be tracked. The resulting content is then deployed to any of IntuiFace’s supported platforms: Windows, iPad, Android, Chrome OS, Samsung SMART Signage Platform and LG devices running webOS.

Each end point automatically collects event data and forwards it to a highly scalable and redundant cloud-based hub hosted by IntuiLab. From this hub, data points are automatically forwarded to the analytics, marketing and/or data warehousing platform preferred by the business. Options include native support for Microsoft Excel, any Internet-accessible SQL or noSQL database, REST-based Web service queries, the Mixpanel analytics platform or any of 150+ platforms made available through the Segment data integration platform. These data points can then be merged by the business with preexisting data collected via the Web and mobile devices, closing a major gap undermining a true omni-channel strategy. The resulting insight can be used for everything from round-trip improvement and update of deployed content to marketing campaign alteration, initiation of A/B testing across deployments and messaging refinement.

intuilablogo“Businesses thrive on insight about their end users. We realized that IntuiFace-based interactive experiences were sitting on a mountain of useful data,” says Vincent Encontre, IntuiLab’s CEO. “By eliminating the need to write code and by automating the export of data to virtually any analytics platform on the market, IntuiFace makes analytics accessible to every business regardless of skill set. That this is achieved through the use of cutting edge interactive content is the cherry on top.”

IntuiFace data tracking is available to all users, even those using the time unlimited free version. A tiered set of priced data tracking plans – starting with a Free plan – give IntuiFace users access to an ever increasing number of data points. All plans include support for Excel, Mixpanel, Segment and custom REST-based Web service queries. IntuiFace data points can be forwarded to a client’s own database or to an IntuiLab-hosted database in higher tier plans.

More details and a demo video can be found here. Or watch this short one below.

So I had to read that release about three times to zero in on what’s up here, watch the video, and conclude whether it was new or interesting. I think it is, and here’s why …

In a nutshell, the latest version of the platform has a toolset available to any users – even those on the free version – to introduce and use data tracking to their specifications. This new version includes tools to tag, set triggers for actions, and specify what data a user might want to collect whenever those  actions are triggered – like someone touches a screen or uses a keyboard or another interactive piece enabled by IntuiFace.

The toolset allows users to specify what data to collect and where to direct it, which can be to a cloud directory in a standardized, easily ingested fromat like .csv, or they can use data connectors (using APIs in the background) to send it into cloud-based analytics platforms that they subscribe to

While many or maybe most CMS platform,s or coded Flash or HTML5 interactive applications, will offer some sort of data log capability, they will often be limited or standardized, here’s-whatcha-get reports, raw log files or exported .csv files. Then the end-users have to use what they get, or figure things out from there.

The proposition here is that IntuiFace 5.2 has built all that in and made it very easy to get and use this data, and then mash it up with other data sources it has access to – anything from weather to store footfall to sales to time of day. At the device level, IntuiFace is grabbing information from data sources and combining it with events captured at the screen.

Then if the network operator uses a cloud-based analytics platform, that data can get merged with other data – from things like store systems, loyalty or mobile sniffing – to mix and and analyze. Those tools outside the signage software ecosystem are ones that are probably going to be a lot more robust and insight-rich, as opposed to signage CMS platforms that serve a wide range of needs, by necessity.

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