What being a data analyst is like in 2028
Microsoft announced Mesh this week, a mixed reality platform where people at work can ‘holoport’ themselves into virtual spaces, appearing as avatars, and interact with each other and with digital renderings of workplace artefacts — a car design prototype, or an architect’s plans for a building.
VR is coming, and it will come to the workplace. This is a fundamental platform shift and it has the potential to kaleidoscope all the basic workplace primitives we’ve gotten used to since the 90s — email, messaging, powerpoint, spreadsheets, meetings; everything, ultimately.
When ‘going to work’ means putting on a VR headset, things really start to change. The interaction primitives change dramatically — you don’t really use mouse any more, you use something more like an iPad but where the space all around you is the surface. You drag, drop, pinch, swipe, long-press; what does it feel like to build a power point when you can use these intuitive and expressive gestures? And like the trader with three computer screens, you would have a much wider display of information, so you can drag and drop things across different parts of your workspace — Excel to your left (maybe you physically turn to focus on it), Powerpoint in the middle, Google search for images on your right (drag the image straight into your deck).
What is like going through your inbox¹ using 3D motions to drive? You ‘beckon’ gesture an email to expand it full screen in front of you, then ‘discard’ gesture perhaps to move it to trash, or perhaps flick it upwards to mean ‘remind me about this email later’. What does typing look like when you reply? It could be a virtual keyboard of course, but it could also be audio-based. These VR headsets will likely contain the equivalent of AirPods, allowing you to just speak out your answer and it would transcribe it all in real time into the email body. Would you even need keyboards anymore? Touch gestures would be transformative to workplace interaction, and so would audio control; but both together is revolutionary. It could be that audio is used for lower-precision controls like search retrieval e.g. looking for a document or an image, while touch is used for higher-precision needs, like designing a powerpoint slide. In combination this could engender a complete, bottoms-up reset of the basic way we use software at work.
What’s next? Well imagine that you have a data analyst on your team. In 2021 she would probably have sent her latest analysis round in a deck, each slide unveiling the next part of a story that adds up to some valuable insights about something you’re working on. There may well have been a meeting where she took folks through the presentation. This sort of things is happening in every workplace, every day, more or less.
How does she share her analysis in 2028? Taking some inspiration from Robolox, I would say she will build a virtual ‘room’, like an exhibition space, where laid out on the walls will be all the graphs and artefacts of her analysis. Instead of clicking through slides, you would walk around this space, much like being at a museum, or an art gallery. Each of the visualisations would be life-size, possibly interactive to some degree. She would have built the story out as a linear physical flow, akin to the ordering of slides in a deck.
She hosts a meeting one morning to take a bunch of colleagues through the analysis in person — very much like a presentation format of today except you are all walking around this virtual exhibition space (as avatars) with her as your guide, taking questions and telling the story. Afterwards, instead of saying ‘I’ll share the deck’, she says ‘I’ll share the room’, and you and any other colleagues who have access can drop back into the room anytime.
You tell a colleague in the other part of the company who’s interested; you agree the three of you will drop into the room that afternoon and wonder round. What gets interesting here is that, since the tour was conducted via avatar, it should be recordable. So you could potentially play back ‘clips’ of the analyst’s avatar giving her spiel about this or that graph. You might be able to leave commentary for the analyst to pick up in the same format — offering your reaction and suggesting an extension to one piece of the analysis. Maybe after the meeting an automatic transcript of the discussion is generated, some highlights are presented to you that you can optionally send on as text to the analyst for her to review in her own time.
The conversational dynamic changes when a deck becomes a room. For one thing, you would hope that you have everyone’s full attention, because they should be fully immersed in the space, rather than half-listening, half-checking their email. The design policy for this ‘multi-threading’ i.e. the virtual environment equivalent of someone checking their phone in a meeting, will be a subtle but important part of shaping the experience of the workplace in the future. Building in ‘deep attention’ features by design could become popular; when the basic, underlying platform for doing work gets gutted and re-built (laptop/computer now > VR headset in future) there is an opportunity to radically rethink the unintentional effects that are created by the form the technology takes (such as having 15 tabs open at once).
Rooms like these don’t have to be exclusive to data analysts of course. A user researcher could do a similar thing, building a room featuring clips of recent user research sessions, interspersed with his insights, context and recommendations. Think what presenting a new strategy would be like in one of these rooms — certainly a much richer canvas on which to paint a picture of the future for your audience.
Its not clear how a new platform like this would alter the basic, physical ways of working we’ve all got used. Do you need offices, or can your employees work from anywhere via their VR headset? What would an office look like if everyone was wearing a VR headset, flailing their arms around, gabbling to the air and walking into each other? Do you need a desk, what for? Would people mostly spend their work days standing up? The default matters a lot here, whether you are in-person by default and put the VR device on for a specific purpose (such as visiting your analyst’s room), or whether the VR device is the default, and meeting up in person is saved for big social events hosted by the company every week perhaps, or every month.
However it all shakes out it seems obvious that by the time this decade is out the way we work today will seem terribly outdated. Sending documents around, sat at a static desk poking around with a mouse. It will all seem so 2D, so flat, like how impossibly slow we imagine the workplaces of the 70s or 80s would have been. The first wave of computing and the internet mainly took documents and put them online, hence many people’s day to day work looks like excel, powerpoint, email. In the workplace of the future documents aren’t the primitive, space itself is the primitive; and that shift could change almost everything about what it feels like to be at work.
¹For what its worth I don’t think people will use email much in the future, but it gets the intuition across
