While reviewing a site last week, I noticed the following behaviour in a faceted search UI: Search for something as free text (eg “cups”); get a big list of cups and related items. Use filters to narrow down the list by selecting a search facet (eg “plastic”) Select another facet (eg “colour”). I then see there is no…
Category: Graphic Design
At the trainspotting end of the UX spectrum of activity lie articles like this, from Information Architects Inc., which for some reason I find myself reading. While IA’s article is far too long and badly needs editing, the following occurs to me:
I often complain that infoviz for web stats is poor if you’re not an analyst by trade. Now that I’m working for one of the most popular websites in the world, I should at least come up with a device that could be used to answer the fundamental questions we have when looking at real-time analysis of a news article: Is this article doing well? Is it likely to do better or worse from now on? Should we replace this article with another one? Obviously…
There’s some debate about the utility of “high-fidelity wireframes” at work at the moment. It’s a reasonably common topic in the UX chattersphere too, so I thought I’d expand on it here. Firstly, to avoid some potential misunderstandings – let’s make some assumptions about the domain we’re in: 1. There are two main roles on the UX team: visual designer and non-visual designer (the latter is my currently preferred internal term for what is often e…
I dislike pie charts. I may even dislike people who use them. But even worse than a pie chart is a quite recent device that doesn’t (I don’t think) have a name. These are the circles that appear mostly in newspapers and magazines to illustrate some quantitative comparison – here’s an example of what I mean. This technique has perhaps been legitimised by the likes of David McCandless, who appears obsessed by both circles and the using of areas to …
Data visualisation (“dataviz” or more broadly, “infoviz”) appears to serve two main purposes. The first is to show data to people who are not analysts or experts. This is so that they can understand some or all of something that has already been identified in that data. The assumption here is that raw tables, or perhaps bunches of charts or diagrams, don’t easily reveal what’s going on. An example of this would be Tufte’s favourite graphic, which…
I was having a look at the state of Japanese web design today (we’re doing some customer research there at the moment) and saw this towards the bottom of the home page of the Yomiuri Shinbun site. For those who don’t know, the Yomiuri is the world’s largest newspaper by circulation. I would imagine their website is also read by Japanese from a wide variety of demographics. At first glance, the object looks like an oddly-arranged table of news sto…
David McCandless is an interesting person doing interesting things. Interesting to me, that is, because his work exemplifies something I find deeply mysterious in the way people regard information visualisation. His pursuit of “beauty” seems to be a licence to override clarity, truth, and even common sense. Yet he is widely lauded (here he is writing on the Guardian’s Data Blog). In this, he is surely the anti-Tufte. McCandless’s current pièce de…
Regular readers of Webtorque will recall that I put forward a theory of statistical information some months ago, which probably needed to be read in the style of the Monty Python sketch of a similar vein. Today, I have another theory about the visual presentation of statistical information, and it is a theory that is this: The value of a statistic decreases exponentially to the amount of non-statistical information included with it. This is there…
… Francois Jordaan Thanks for the tip re: Aza’s demo. I liked it….
… 英国 Yeah – I’m not so sure Netcasty is from Deutschland – I can think of a few other places more like. And I think that the guy in the English Viking hat is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall no less … 英国 and here’s Hugh http://singstargame.com/en-gb/User/Profile/?user=228 英国 and here’s a lot more from Netcasty: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=netcasty…
I’ve been thinking about “info graphics” again, and what a tricky area this is. It’s doubly so because a large part of what I do for a living is information design. There is essentially an “emperor’s new clothes” problem prevalent in the production of information graphics. To me, the vast majority of subjects that I see addressed by such graphics (in particular, complex ones) would be better expressed in words – either spoken or written. I recent…
… Standard & Poor’s site is larded up to the eyeballs with JavaScript and Flash, and (surprise!) is a broken wreak of a site because of it. Firefox users can’t sign up for one thing. I mailed them about that, naturally, while the chances of them replying properly are of course zero. At least they show you a warning – and a picture of somebody attacking their thumb with a dentist’s drill. Are their designers trying to tell you something? …