The world is full of intelligent people. I am constantly amazed at the ability of people to create new things, most often by applying existing ideas in interesting new ways. I love getting that “aha!” moment when I realize how they’ve taken an existing paradigm and applied it in inventive ways somewhere else. On a side note, whenever I have such an “aha!” moment I think of Brian Regan’s comedy skit on youtube where he discusses the instructions for eating
|
||||||
|
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. 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 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 Toyota can’t say for sure whether the recent rounds of recalls will definitively resolve the safety issues. What a mess they are in! But we shouldn’t be surprised – automotive systems are so complicated that it is frankly surprising we haven’t had more I love playing those spot the difference games. You know exactly how many differences there are, you know that it’s only a matter of time before you find them all, and you know that even if you run out of time or patience you can cheat and find the last one you were looking for. It’s mindless entertainment. At work, however, when I am looking at two documents that are almost exactly the same, the last thing I want to do 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 |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Information Architecture - All Rights Reserved |
||||||