Lessons from several years of building a low-code BI tool

BI tools allow people to interact with data without writing code. At some level, this is also the core problem of other low-code or no-code tools like app builders or websites that help you make websites. Those tools tend to perform simpler operations on the data (searching and filtering instead of statistical formulas), but there’s a lot of overlap in the challenges you face when your users want to be precise without using code.

As a result, a lot of the design principles that make a good BI tool also apply to other low-code or no-code systems. I wrote up a blog post for the Sigma Computing blog that describes some of the lessons we’ve learned over the years about how to make complicated tasks intuitive with a low-code interface: