Presentation: TweetDemocratising attention data at guardian.co.uk

guardian.co.uk is one of the world’s most popular news websites, visited by over 80 million unique browsers every month. Yet in the past our journalists and editors found it difficult to get meaningful, timely data on what people were reading. Even the minority granted access to analytics tools struggled to get actionable information.

Over the last year, we’ve built “ophan”, an in-house real-time analytics system. By working closely with journalists and editors, we’ve focussed on what they can action to provide a better experience for our existing readers and enable more people discover our unique content. By allowing access to all Guardian employees, we’ve empowered many more people internally to contribute to expanding our engagement and reach.

And by being seriously resource constrained - two people, part time - we’ve robustly prioritised, rapidly evolved our cloud-based architecture and necessarily valued simple iterative delivery above all else.

This talk aims to convince you that by ruthlessly eliminating complexity in software, in architecture and in data presentation, even small teams can make a big difference to an organisation.