What Does FRED Teach Us about Successful Data Products?
The New York Times recently published a love letter to a data tool. The recipient of this adoration is the economic data solution provided by the St. Louis Federal Reserve and affectionally called FRED.
The article starts:
Fans post about him on social media. Swag bearing his name sells out on the regular. College professors dedicate class sessions and textbook sections to him. Foreign government officials have been known to express jealousy over his skills, and one prominent economist refers to him as a “national treasure.”
Meet FRED, a 33-year-old data tool from St. Louis, Mo., and the economics world’s most unlikely celebrity.
FRED had nearly 15 million users last year and has been growing in popularity. Fan’s can’t help but gush:
“I know I sound like such a complete nerd but data visualisation makes Econ 100 times more interesting and engaging. Long live FRED!”
Sadly, we don’t have a huge number of public examples of data products that generate that kind of enthusiasm. Spotify Wrapped is a personalized, consumer example that also boasts a strong fandom. More often than not, data products results in gnashing of teeth at the data, poor user experience, a puzzling over the value.
Why does FRED break through? Reading through the comments on the article reveals how this solution has found a loyal audience:
Low Friction. FRED has no paywall, advertising, or passwords to stand in the way of getting to value fast.
Credibility. FRED uses data from trusted sources such as the BLS and US Census. People believe the data they are seeing, and therefore are willing to move on to interpreting what it means.
Easy Sharing. Commenters rave about being able to save graphs that they can use in their discussions. The NYTs notes: “The tool’s signature baby blue graphs dot social media and crop up on many of the world’s most popular news websites.”
Usability. FRED is easy to learn and has been refined over time. Currently the product team is rolling out updates to the visualization. One commenter theorizes: “I think a lot of people switched to Fred after the horrible redesign of US census ‘Data Finder’.”
Simplicity and Focus. FRED doesn’t try to do too much. Its primary visualization is a trend chart. Users pick from thousands of economic metrics to see how the numbers are changing. That’s it.
User Control. A much-appreciated feature is the ability to transform the data with simple formulas. There is a simple calculation UI that makes this possible. Many of the commenters shared their favorite, customized graph that they had composed from the data.
Data that Matters. The information available in FRED influences important financial decisions on Wall Street and drives economic policy. While there are plenty of people posting economic data on social media, the core audience for FRED are professionals who use this information for their job.
Evolution. Good (data) products take time to improve. FRED has been around in a digital form since 1995. The St. Louis Fed understood the vision for the product and has continuously invested to make it better.
To build a better data product, we can do worse than model our approach after FRED. Let us show you how.