1. TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA Ivey Chiu, Ph.D. Senior Business Analyst

2. USER BEHAVIOUR SOME THINGS APPEAR UNQUANTIFIABLE Is this dress beautiful? Does that perfume smell pleasant? Are these products innovative? Would you use this? Are you happy? Why did you buy? 2 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 3. 3 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 4. WAYS OF MEASURING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE 4 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA EXPERIMENTALLY Contrived Expensive Time consuming BIG DATA Noisy Messy Statistically insignificant 5. USING BIG DATA TO QUANTIFY THE UNQUANTIFIABLE 1. Designing better, more successful products (so customers will want use the product) 2. Assessing customer decision-making and satisfaction 3. Understanding customer behaviour Currency exchange rate Weather 5 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 6. DESIGNING BETTER PRODUCTS Inventors and designers often are inspired by things found in their surroundings Biomimetic Design: Application of biology to engineering problems Analogies and metaphors are a very important tool for learning, cognition and problem solving 6 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA BIOLOGY ENGINEERING 7. EXAMPLES 7 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 8. PROBLEM 1. Not all inventors and designers are biologists 2. Biology is a VERY large domain and biological knowledge is growing rapidly 3. How do we do this systematically and without bias? 8 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 9. SOLUTION Search the biological literature Books, journals, websites etc. Very large data set Unstructured, unorganized, free form data from thousands if not millions of authors over many decades and centuries 9 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 10. APPROACH Search existing knowledge sources for biological phenomena Initial CorpusLife: The Science of Biology (Purves et. al, 2001) Search using functional keywords, i.e., verbs Review results for relevant phenomena 10 (Vakili & Shu, 2001; Chiu & Shu, 2004; Mak & Shu, 2004; Chiu & Shu, 2007; Cheong & Shu, 2013, etc.) TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 11. APPROACHCHALLENGES Biologists and engineers have different lexicons! Investigated cleaning, or, removing dirt from clothes Clean resulted in few relevant matches A biochemist suggested defend 11 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 12. METHOD AND RESULTS Necessary to bridge biology and engineering lexicon Developed method for generating biologically significant words from functional key verbs Frequency Collocation Grammar 12 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 13. RESULTS Retrieved phenomenon: Trees and plants remove parts of themselves to defend against threats, e.g., infections, cold weather TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 13 Example concept: Clothing with removable, replaceable panels for ease of cleaning 14. FURTHER APPLICATIONS Source solutions from any domain to help inspire solutions in any other domain 14 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA MATH MEDICINE ART MANUFACTURING ECONOMICS ECOLOGY 15. MEASURING CUSTOMER DECISION-MAKING FACTORS How do we figure out why customers made the decisions they made? Or if they are happy or satisfied? What if we could just get customers to tell us what they thought or felt and still get a good measure? Lots of data Messy data 15 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA PLEASE RATE YOUR SATISFACTION 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Disagree Agree I feel that this has been a great experience in both the product and the service. However I also feel that I should let you know that there can be some... 16. EXAMPLE: MEASURING CUSTOMER PERCEPTION OF PRODUCT CREATIVITY Creativity is important in todays economy A predictor of product and economic success Affects customer satisfaction and purchasing decisions Recognizable Quantifiable? 16 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA (Cross, 2006; Mahle, 2007; Gero 2008 etc.) 17. MEASURING CREATIVITY In a small study on New Product Development, participants were asked to assess products based on overall product creativity 17 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 18. METHOD 1. Participants assessed products on a 7-point scale 2. Additionally, participants commented on product creativity using free-form, unstructured English 18 THIS PRODUCT IS CREATIVE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Disagree Agree TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 19. ANALYSIS 1. Words in comments tagged with psychometric properties Cognitive and emotional insight (Pennebaker et al., 2001; Pennebaker, 2011) 2. Frequency of psychometric word types determined and correlated with numeric ratings 19 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA POSITIVE EMOTION WORDS Ready Accept Helpful NEGATIVE EMOTION WORDS Awkward Bad Weird 20. RESULT: POSITIVE WORD USE VARIES PROPORTIONALLY WITH PRODUCT CREATIVITY RATING 20 y = 0.6793x + 2.4314 R = 0.81, R = 0.89 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 %Usage Product Creativity Rating (1=lowest, 7 = Highest) PosEmo NegEmo Linear (PosEmo) Linear (NegEmo) Frequency of Emotion Words vs. Product Creativity Rating (Chiu & Salustri, 2012) TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 21. APPLICATIONS Much wider basis for obtaining customer insights Free-form feedback Real time CS systems Social media May help to gain better insight into factors that are not necessarily congruous with numeric scales 21 IS THIS TASTY? AM I HAPPY? DO I LIKE THIS PRODUCT? DO I TRUST THIS SELLER? TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 22. HELPING TO EXPLAIN OTHER CUSTOMER BEHAVIOURS Exchange rate Economies are sensitive to exchange rates eBay Canada business is also affected by FX 22 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 23. RESULTS Overall, Canadian buyer behaviour is logical and consistent Global behaviour: eBay Canada Business growth sensitive to FX growth 23 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 24. GLOBAL BEHAVIOUR VS. LOCAL BEHAVIOUR Local behaviour: Does not appear consistent nor rational Not sensitive to FX Better understanding of local behaviour is important as this is actually where we are most of the time Hypotheses Existence of a dont care attitude Difficulty with performing comparisons in this small range 24 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 25. WHAT ELSE? 25 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA Employment rate Price of gold Could cover Humidity Temperature HAPPINESS SATISFACTION CREATIVITY INNOVATION 26. SOME FINAL THOUGHTS Big Data can help to understand and quantify user behaviours Can also raise more questions! 26 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA BIOLOGY ENGINEERING 27. QUESTIONS? ivchiu@ebay.ca 28. REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING Cheong, H.M, Shu, L.H., 2013, Using templates and mapping strategies to support analogical transfer in biomimetic design, Design Studies, DOI:10.1016/j.destud.2013.02.002 Chiu, I., Salustri, F.A., 2012, Quantifying Product Creativity, Unpublished Study, Ryerson University, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Chiu, I., Shu, L., 2004, Natural Language Analysis for Biomimetic Design, Proceedings of 2004 ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, September 28-October 2, 2004, DETC2004/DTM-57250 Chiu, I., Shu, L.H., 2007, Biomimetic Design through Natural Language Analysis to Facilitate Cross-Domain Information Retrieval, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, 21/1:45-59 Mak, T.W., Shu, L.H., 2004, Abstraction of Biological Analogies for Design, CIRP Annals, Vol. 53/1:117-120 Pennebaker, J., 2011, The Secret Lives of Pronouns Pennebaker, J. et al, 2001, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, www.liwc.net Purves, S., et al, 2001, Life: The Science of Biology, Sinauer Associates, Inc. W.H. Freeman And Company Vakili, V., Shu, L, 2001, Towards Biomimetic Concept Generation, Proceedings of 2001 ASME Design Technical Conferences, Design Theory and Methodology Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, U.S.A., September 9- 12, 2001, Paper No. DETC2001/DTM-21715 TACKLING THE UNQUANTIFIABLE WITH BIG DATA 28