Simplifying the User Experience

Nielsen’s Answers On-Demand® (AOD) is an ad hoc reporting platform that provides flexible on-the-fly processing to generate insights from consumer data. The legacy AOD system was a single web application making it hard to manage functional changes. Our new solution now consists of a suite of applications including; a reporting framework, data selector, design tool and rendering engine. With this architecture, the applications can function as a suite or individual applications used to improve other legacy tools or functional components of other new solutions. The flexibility of Ext JS framework made it easy to integrate our custom built components while providing easily extendable set of core components. Some of our custom features include; application recovery (accomplished by saving sessions), the multi tab reporting capability built on tab panel, lightweight canvas layout with multiple visualization options as well as a custom page container. Following the beta release of our new platform, Nielsen’s development team partnered with Sencha engineers to look at the innovative ways we had leveraged the framework and how Sencha’s product roadmap and new feature development could continue to grow with us. Since then, we have integrated Sencha Cmd with Gradle to package, build and deploy applications. Features such as image spriting, JavaScript compiler, package management and command line syntax have proven effective during application development. Coupled with Nielsen user experience standards, Sencha Cmd has allowed Nielsen to easily build custom Ext JS themes. These themes are now widely leveraged by other Ext JS-based applications within the company. Added benefit of using the Ext JS 4.x framework was allowing AOD to become mobile friendly. Clients may use most of the application’s features on their tablets. Moving forward, we are pursuing an Ext JS 5.x migration and investigating the potential for a comprehensive mobile strategy.