Today finds me in Frankfurt working at a customer site. What with jetlag and late nights it leaves me less time to work on blogs. But it’s Saturday and I have some time, so here goes. Today’s blog is a brief survey of interesting visualization techniques for complex data. I have a lot of experience in this area dating back to my graduate studies in which part of my work was to reconstruct the tracks of subatomic particles through detectors.
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Mining for information is established on a much less solid foundation because the nature of the information you will uncover is by definition unknown, and hence the potential profits are also unknown. I’m not talking about business information systems that analyze sales trends and help identify emerging trends so you can make money by recognizing and keeping up with the trends. These are clearly tied to the profit motive and the business imperative is undeniable. I’m talking about the other types of information in the system such as project statistics, emails, twitter feeds, source code repositories, feature requests, performance statistics, operations logs, and so If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past 30+ years of user interface development, it’s that a given action should be invoked via multiple gestures. For a given command there is no single gesture that everyone can agree on is perfect for the task. Personally, when I’ve used a command more than about 3 or 4 times I start looking for its keyboard equivalent. Other people seem content to use a mouse for everything, but my carpal tunnel starts Occasionally I have to shift around my financial records from the early stone age – 1997 and before. My wife gets on my case to get rid of the paperwork but I never seem to get around to it. It doesn’t take up much room so why bother? In the back of my mind I can imagine a social anthropologist finding the files in an attic some 200 years from now and wondering in awe over the quaint practices of Speech recognition is like the fusion reactor of computer science. Fusion research is always “just 20 years away from practical applications”. This was the case in 1960, 1980, 1990 and 2000. All along we learned a lot of useful and interesting stuff, but we still don’thave access to clean, virtually limitless electricity. At one point in the early days of nuclear energy people actually talked about electricity being so plentiful that it would be “too cheap to meter”. And they I’ve often wondered why user interfaces always seem to be always constrained to the two dimensions on your computer screen. Certainly in the business information world this is the case. On my way home today I heard an interview on NPR with Michael Sweet from the Berklee College of Music in Boston that got me thinking. Sweet was talking about composing music for video games, which rely heavily on sound feedback to set the mood for the player. When the My ISP decided to stop delivering services to me this weekend. I suppose they got tired of taking my money and would prefer to see how things would work out if I didn’t pay them any more. Anyway, I get itchy when I don’t write for a few days so I took my lunch hour to finish this draft… When you are developing a product of any kind, you need to keep track of the requirements that dictate what goes in The decision of whether to add data to the database – in effect, denormalizing it to some extent – is partly informed by the need to reduce the overall complexity. As with the internet and the Charles proxy, the ability to see the raw data is always Recently I’ve been reading an information architecture perspective on internet search algorithms. My perspective is that internet search is not corporate search. Of course many of the concepts are relevant and transferrable, but there are differences. Let’s start with a review, then talk about the A transactional system has information going in both directions: Users enter information into the system as they do their business, and other users pull information out. The information going into an online e-commerce system is highly structured and the user has no control over where the information goes and to a large extent, what it looks like. But when the system is used to support product or service development, the user has considerably more latitude. Or at least, should have. After |
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