Posted by Goldy Arora, Director of Google for Work Solutions, MediaAgility
Editor's note: Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Goldy Arora, Director of Google for Work solutions at MediaAgility, a technology consulting company building industry specific solutions. See how MediaAgility and other developers are using the Google Maps APIs to bring maps and location content to their users.
I love using elegant code to come up with cool applications, but I also know that being a great developer means thinking both like a business person and an engineer. When we create map-based applications at MediaAgility, we think about not just what we are building and how it will look and operate, but why we are building it. How, in other words, do the maps we make meet both our business objectives and make a positive impact on people’s lives?
We use the tools in the
Google Maps API to develop solutions in a way that helps businesses make sense of data. Right now, we’re working on an application called
Insurance Insights, which will help sales teams at Insurance companies create campaigns and base decisions on geographic data related to crime, income and natural disasters.
When working with maps, we aim to understand the business objectives of the end customer and how it will impact lives. In the case of Insurance Insights, we are taking several steps in the development process that we think will result in a valuable and user-friendly product, including:
- Publishing data from multiple sources. We’re adding back-end systems and databases so we can add useful information to Google Maps. For example, we’ve integrated income data for residents, locations of recent natural disasters and sales databases. For this product, we built a script to obtain Salesforce data using their API. Then we employed the Google Maps API to publish the Salesforce data to our maps.
- Creating multiple viewing options. Our map overlays allow users to choose how they want to view the information. An agent may want to market insurance for valuables in high-income neighborhoods, or perhaps offer flood insurance to people in flood-prone areas. They’ll benefit from the insights provided by the various overlays for different marketing campaigns.
- Erring on the side of more data. We upload as much data as we can. We then call the data with the Maps API whenever we want to test a new feature on the map. Since we are data-ready, we create prototypes within an hour instead of taking days – and build rich, insightful features in less time to market.
- Experimenting and improving. We iterate frequently to make the best possible product. In the case of Insurance Insights, we created a basic application using Google Maps so we could show it to potential customers. As we work with real market feedback, we add more features. This iterative approach is much smarter than spending six months on an application before finding out if customers like it – we’d rather go to market every six weeks so we know which direction to pursue.
Maps are an important part of people’s daily lives, and we're eager to engineer more applications built around new ideas. For example, visual forecasting and pipeline metrics are some of the key features in our next release of Insurance Insights.
In many cases, maps are an intuitive and highly visual way to understand a business — much richer and simpler than spreadsheets or presentations. Even if the information is complex, the user experience need not be, all thanks to the Google Maps APIs.
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