Mashable Velocity

Velocity was created at Mashable as a processing system that discovers the next big story to go viral on the web. With a small team including AI and data sci, we used crawling algorithms and machine learning to design this product through a dashboard interface that could surface the speed of shares gained for any given story, including the time it takes to achieve viral status. Created for agencies as well as internal Mashable users, the Impact Score was designed to help the user key in on the content relevant to them. The Analytics View displayed the potential peak virality and time span of the post. The biggest design challenge was taking all of the data that Velocity collected (one million url crawls and five million social data points daily, over 20 topics) and prioritizing which data to display. We learned that Impact Score would be the most important as a holistic summary of the data, followed by speed and number of shares. I also followed the philosophy of keeping the top level simple, displaying only the essentials, allowing the user to choose to dig into further levels for filtering and more detailed data.