Martyn Jones

Data Visualisations

Just found a collection of Data Visualisations collated by Mashable: The Social Media Guide. Whilst most of them are interesting and novel, I’m not sure how useful they are. From an Information Design point of view, it is not immediately clear what you are looking at, and I’m not sure if the spatial positioning, colour scheme and symbols help to derive meaning or to uncover correlations. Equally, from an Interaction Design point of view, often it is not immediately clear what you can do or interact with.

The Digg visualisations are quite interesting. A real-time data stream updates constantly moving, evolving graphics – helping to give a sense that the website and the community around the site are active and alive.

Surely user-interfaces which automatically adapt to a user’s search preferences, search history and search correlations with people and content in their network will become more sophisticated and commonplace.

The Eye Beguiled

The title of this post is taken from Bruno Ernst’s book, chronicling a series of optical illusions by the likes of M. C. Escher. To fully appreciate the image right, you’ll need to click to get a full view of the apparently moving serpent pattern. This image was produced by Akiyoshi Kitaoka who has an astonishing collection of optical illusions on his website.

Put simply, the explanation for this visual tricky is that we cannot wholly trust what we see. The retina in our eyes, the visual cortex and our brain all play a part in interpreting information and filling in gaps. The result is that perceived hue, saturation, contrast, luminance etc, often differs from the original image upon which we cast our gaze. Context has a considerable effect on perceived colours and patterns. This was already known by the end of the nineteenth century as artists such as Georges Seurat experimented with Pointillism and Divisionism. Seurat juxtaposed contrasting colours, causing vibrations of color to the viewer.

Kitaoka’s website demonstrates a number of techniques on how colours and patterns can be combined to create a variety of illusions. As designers we would want to be aware of these techniques so that we can exploit and avoid them:
Moving Patterns 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
(particularly noticeable when scrolling browser window)

Rotating Patterns 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Magnification & Contraction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Wave 1 2 3 4 5
(Move your eye around the image)

Ubiquity: An experiment into connecting the Web with language (Aza Raskin)

The Problem: The Web is Disconnected

“You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.”

“A big direction that we know we are going to move is suggestions based on data-type recognition. We should be able to select an address and Ubiquity should then suggest commands that make sense to apply to an address (like map it, get directions there, find restaurants near there, etc.). Similarly, we should be able to select a phone number and prompt actions like “call”, a time and date should prompt actions like “add to calendar”.”

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/ubiquity-in-depth/

Robert Reimann’s Summary of IxD Skills

This refers to an old article, originally posted June 1, 2001. In it, Reimann outlines his views on what skills are necessary for Interaction Designers:

• Learn new domains quickly
• Solve problems both analytically and creatively
• Be able to visualize and simplify complex systems
• Empathize with users, their needs, and their aspirations
• Understand the strengths and limitations of both humans and technology
• Share a passion for making the world a better place through ethical, purposeful, pragmatic, and elegant design solutions

…and more broadly:

Designers all need some basic skills; interaction designers should be able to draw or write well (doing both is rare and valued), and must be able to communicate excellently with both their colleagues and their clients. The toughest skill to acquire is that combination of creative insight and analytical thinking that is the hallmark of a great interaction designer.

You can still read the full article here.