AreaIQ
A platform that watches global investment, infrastructure, regulation, companies, technology and trade, then works out which of those developments matter to one particular company.
- Owner
- Shika Group
- Type
- Intelligence platform, built and operated by us
- Coverage
- Global. Investment, infrastructure, regulation, companies, technology and trade
- Origin
- Began as a UK postcode directory of 11,235 generated pages, now AreaIQ Places
- Scope
- Product strategy, positioning, information architecture, intelligence UX, source transparency, visual system
- Domain
- areaiq.org
The idea
What changed in the world for your business today?
Investment decisions, infrastructure programmes, regulatory changes, company moves and trade shifts are announced in public every day, across every market. Almost none of them reach the one company they would matter most to.
AreaIQ reads that flow and answers a single question for a single company: which of these developments create an opportunity, or a risk, for you.
The direction
Explained, not asserted.
Intelligence products usually hand you a score and expect trust. This one is built on four rules that are enforced in the product rather than promised in the marketing.
- Every score expands to name exactly what matched, so a person can disagree with it.
- Fact and interpretation are separate fields and are rendered differently, so the two never blur.
- Sourced or not shown. No invented figures and no invented source links.
- Relevance and source confidence are never mixed into a single number.
This is the same argument the earlier postcode product made when it refused to score an area out of ten. A single number is a compression of things that matter differently to different readers, and it hides the reasoning that made it.
The design problem
Make a machine judgement legible.
The hard part is not gathering signals. It is presenting a machine’s judgement so a commercial director can act on it, argue with it, or dismiss it, in under a minute.
The answer was a dark, spatial interface with one entry point, a company address, and a page system where every claim carries its provenance beside it rather than in a footnote nobody opens.
The origin
It started as eleven thousand postcode pages.
AreaIQ began as a UK area directory: house prices, schools, broadband, flood risk and GP surgeries pulled from a dozen government sources into one page per postcode sector, 11,235 of them, each generated and each having to be worth landing on.
That product is not being thrown away. It becomes AreaIQ Places, a free UK area explorer on its own subdomain, while areaiq.org carries the business platform. The directory taught us the pipeline, the page system and the search discipline the new product runs on.
Honest status
Built, and not yet switched on.
The platform is built and the interface is real. The ingestion sources are not connected yet, and the product says so itself: every signal currently shown is labelled as demonstration data, in the interface, on the page.
We would rather show you that than crop it out of the screenshot. It is in the portfolio because the product thinking, the information architecture and the discipline about provenance are the capability worth showing, and because we are the ones who have to live with the decisions.