March 9, 2004
Information Design Watch
From Dynamic Diagrams
Consultants in Visual Logic
In This Issue:
INFORMATION DESIGN
- Angles on the Information Industry, 2004
- A "Call to Action" from the Year 2000
VISUAL EXPLANATION
- A Map of the Airwaves — Visualization as Viewpoint
DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION
- Google Under Fire
- The Incredible Shrinking Interface
INFORMATION DESIGN
Angles on the Information Industry, 2004
Information Today, Inc., has compiled a list of 2004 predictions from 11 captains of the information industry. The responses focus largely on technology and business issues, but there are some interesting remarks on information design practice, in particular, those of Clare Hart, President and CEO of Factiva:
"Text analytics and visualization technologies will further enrich the user experience in the decision-making process. Such technologies rapidly recognize associations among textual elements and can then present them graphically. This ability will permit executives to identify trends at the early stages of development or display material relationships that might signal customer, partner, or supplier activity. Acting quickly upon information will reduce risk and benefit the organization. Without these technologies, this information might otherwise be buried in a mountain of information that would be impossible to navigate."
A "Call to Action" from the Year 2000
Looking back, it's interesting to contrast Hart's comments above with an article in the April 1, 2000 issue of CIO Magazine. "Call to Action" describes the importance of "actionable" information, information "distilled to its essence and organized so that it gets its meaning across effortlessly."
"But the truth is, companies are painfully short of actionable information, and their CIOs are not using information design practices to create it. In spite of the fact that IT leaders rate actionable information important for decision making—4.8 out of 5, on average—most are not on a track to get there.
While Hart focuses on technologies for visualizing data, "Call to Action" emphasizes the role of information designers. These two viewpoints reinforce each other. Tools for mining data simply gives information designers more opportunities to prioritize, condense, and illuminate.
VISUAL EXPLANATION
A Map of the Airwaves — Visualization as Viewpoint
Released in 2003, the New America Foundation's "Citizen's Guide to the Airwaves" includes a 52-page Explanation Report and two-sided, 11" x 38" color poster. The poster's front side is a visual "map" of the radio frequency spectrum; the back provides a nine-panel overview of the policy debate about its use.
Using a chart of radio frequencies as its organizing principle, the map displays the market value of different slices of the spectrum, the devices that use them and the physics of radio waves that determine that use. The result is a highly informative example of the use of visual explanation to make a public policy case.
DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION
Google Under Fire
"'When Google first launched, they had some new tricks that nobody else had thought about before,' says Doug Cutting, an independent software consultant.... But plenty of other search engines now offer intriguing alternatives to Google’s techniques.... "For example, there’s Teoma, which ranks results according to their standing among recognized authorities on a topic, and Australian startup Mooter, which studies the behavior of users to better intuit exactly what they’re looking for. And then there’s the gorilla from Redmond: Microsoft is turning to search as one of its next big business opportunities."
The Incredible Shrinking Interface
From Japan comes this report on cell-phone culture:
About 70 million Japanese — 55 percent of the population — have signed up for Internet access from their cellular phones, a threefold increase from 2000. Cell phones, or keitai in Japanese, are closing in on computers as the device of choice for surfing the Internet.
Robert Jones at O'Reilly Network has a technical primer on the challenges of developing content for cellular devices:
"If you want to reach a broad audience, then your pages need to work on the tiny monochrome screen of a two-year-old phone as well as the higher-resolution, color screen of the newest models. There are two ways to deal with this. You can limit yourself to the most basic markup so that a page is viewable on any phone, or you can identify the capabilities of each phone as it makes a request and deliver rich content specific to that device."
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