1. Great looking product. I clicked through a little bit and liked the general polish, but didn't have time to explore everything.
2. For people whose jobs involve statistical analysis, how much need is there for something like this? The more analysis I do, though, the more I realize that the hard part is collecting the data and programmatically "piping" it from package to package...And from professionals I know in various numbers-based industries, their biggest blind spot seems to be that ability to gather data that doesn't come in a CSV/Excel sheet for them.
* edit: in addition to the challenges presented above, the challenge of cleaning data so that a package like Statwing can do a proper analysis
Agreed that quite often the hardest part is getting the data together (particularly on the web). But from our perspective, it's still true that conducting the actual analysis and visualizing the data should be a lot easier than it is. And that's particularly true if you're in our initial audience, the roughly 50% of SPSS/R/Minitab/etc. users who never use anything past the basic functionality of those programs.
I guess a simpler answer is that we think there's a need because this is a product that I badly wanted when I was an analyst/consultant, splitting time between Excel and the basic functionality of SPSS.
edit: Also, and this isn't very helpful, but we talk to a ton of people about their data analysis needs, and we hear a good chunk of them talk a lot about the pain of using highly technical solutions for relatively simple problems like analyzing a survey.
#3 I have to say, my first impression was that the tutorial was a little annoying, but it's actually done pretty slickily and it introduces features, such as the multiple variable analysis, that I probably would not have stumbled upon in the first place. Well done.
#4 That's my SOPA project you're referencing! :) https://www.statwing.com/demos/sopa
(though if you can edit the copy, credit should also go to the Center for Responsive Politics, from which the campaign finance data was collected)
Nice! It's a great dataset, really fun, and we're big fans of ProPublica.
We'll definitely edit the copy. I'll ping you unicast to make sure we did it right. Yay!
edit: Also, thanks for the feedback on the tour. Our goal is to make the interface so intuitive that it shouldn't require the tour to know what to do. We've got some updates in mind that should get us much closer to that goal.
"For people whose jobs involve statistical analysis, how much need is there for something like this?"
I don't know who the creators are targeting, but perhaps it's not experienced people? One of the great parts of the internet is the way it seems to lower the barrier of entry for just about everything. If this app can help people learn how to do simple statistical analysis, there just might be a load of value there. I didn't really click around, but something they might think about doing is allowing users to hyperlink directly to an "analysis session" so a blogger can not only link to a graph, but the data itself. I can imagine a scenario where a blogger writes a post about maybe housing prices, and draws some unreasonable conclusion. Then a reader goes, and adds in inflation data which changes the story. He then replies in the comments with a link to his new "analysis session" spurring a new conversation.
Its probably taking the tool to a different direction, but i really like what's here.
"If this app can help people learn how to do simple statistical analysis"
IMO, that is big IF. Statistical analysis is like writing security software: if you are not an expert, do not do it; if you are an expert, you already know you should not do it (but you also know that, sometimes, somebody has to do it, anyways)
The challenge is in finding a feature set that is useful, yet foolproof, and beats what Excel provides.
2. For people whose jobs involve statistical analysis, how much need is there for something like this? The more analysis I do, though, the more I realize that the hard part is collecting the data and programmatically "piping" it from package to package...And from professionals I know in various numbers-based industries, their biggest blind spot seems to be that ability to gather data that doesn't come in a CSV/Excel sheet for them.
* edit: in addition to the challenges presented above, the challenge of cleaning data so that a package like Statwing can do a proper analysis