AE Stories

This post was written by Oliver Belmans & Bram Vanschoenwinkel

A previous series of blog posts on Marketing Analytics offered an extensive overview of the available analytical techniques for marketing and their added value. Some examples of these techniques included market basket analysis, customer segmentation and churn prediction. A conclusion reached in these blog posts was that data analytics are the ideal extension to traditional marketing: based on data, we gain insights into (potential) customers and their behaviour, so that we can target them in an even more personalised manner.

The first of a two-part blog post zooms in on an important category of marketing analytics: Geospatial analytics or Geographic analysis. What can geographic analysis signify for your business? What is the added value of using this analysis? In a second blog post, we will explain the more technical aspects, show you how you can start up this analysis with the help of the open-source software R (the R Project for Statistical Computing) and provide a complete step-by-step plan of our own workflow.

Today, we will focus on the basics of User Experience. We start at the beginning, a technique at the core of User Centered design & User Experience design: Usability Testing. 
According to Wikipedia, Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. It's a very important usability practice, since it gives you direct input on how real users use your system. It allows you to discover bottlenecks in your design you overlooked yourself, and hands you specific guidelines to improve your system instantly.  This blogpost will show you that usability testing isn't something new: people have been testing their products on their users for  quite some time. In addition, we will demonstrate how to conduct such a usability test in practice.

This blog post was written by Ruben Vuylsteke & Christophe Bonduelle.

Smart Manufacturing, Industry 4.0, IoT, etc. are hot topics in our environment. To learn more, we visited the ABISS (Advanced Business & Industrial Software Summit) trade fair held on Thursday 5 October at the XPO in Kortrijk. Throughout the day, the questions at the back of our minds were: “What can AE signify for these companies?” and “What does AE still have to learn to become relevant to these companies?” Finding answers to these questions requires further thought but before that, here is our report of this extremely interesting day!

The annual conference of the Business Architecture Guild -  a BAR professional association known for the BIZBOK® Guide - took place in Brussels this year. We visited the event and learned about the importance of BAR, or Business Architecture. BAR is a relatively new discipline, which is still in search of uniformity and recognition. What is Business Architecture exactly and how is it implemented in practice? What is the added value of BAR and how can you convince the C-level management of this? We gathered different opinions during the conference and examined the best practices.

The gigantic technological evolution of the latest years provided us with a lot of cool gadgets. These gadgets are not only fun to play with, they have underused potential to become the answers to huge challenges our society faces. 1 of these challenges is the communication between deaf and hearing people. During our Hackathon, we developed a platform to unite them.