June 20, 2006
Information Design Watch
From Dynamic Diagrams
Consultants in Visual Logic
In This Issue:
INFORMATION DESIGN
- Design Does Not Get More Hands-On Than This
VISUAL EXPLANATION
- Bar Graphs at Em Height
BUSINESS
- What Does Google Run On?
- DesignBusinessArchitectural Thinking
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
- Cold Spring Harbor Protocols Launches on Highwire
- Chris Jackson Joins Dynamic Diagrams
INFORMATION DESIGN
Design Does Not Get More Hands-On Than This
Remember subliminal advertising? A Time.com article on "menu engineer" Gregg Rapp details the totally visible design tricks a restaurant will use to steer patrons to higher profit selections:
"The way prices are listed is very important. 'This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get wrong,' he explains. 'If all the prices are aligned on the right, then I can look down the list and order the cheapest thing.' It's better to have the digits and dollar signs discreetly tagged on at the end of each food description. That way, the customer's appetite for honey-glazed pork will be whetted before he sees its cost."
One ongoing difficulty in the design business is quantifying return. This is not so for Rapp:
"Rapp is so sure of his menu makeovers that he offers a money-back guarantee that his menu will raise profits–and in his 25 years in the business, he has yet to issue a refund."
VISUAL EXPLANATION
Bar Graphs at Em Height
In his forthcoming book, Beautiful Evidence (2006), Edward R. Tufte explores the idea of "sparklines," simple graphs whose y-axis is scaled to the height of a line of text. A draft chapter of Beautiful Evidence provides many examples of the concept and is accompanied by additional comments from Tufte and others:
We came across sparklines on David Pinto's
Baseball Musings site, where he has recently experimented with text-height graphs for such data sets as strikeouts per game (Jason Schmidt) and hits per game (Joe Mauer vs. Alex Rios).
Pinto credits Joe Gregorio who created the Baseball Musings sparklines on his online image generator. Gregorio, in turn, links to Tufte.
BUSINESS
What Does Google Run On?
According to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, Google runs on trust. Which makes him wonder about its prospects:
"Lately, though, I've been wondering if Google has peaked. The reason is that, for lots of different groups of people, Google's reputation as good guys has been stained. And I'm not sure what Google really has to bank on, besides a good reputation."
Reynolds points out that users can easily switch from Google to a competitor like
Ask just by typing a different URL. However the barriers to change are not as low as he suggests -- baseline users will use Google until it fails as a service while the webheads that are paying attention to Google's PR problems may also have a Gmail account or run Google Desktop. And until advertisers see a change in traffic, they have no incentive to switch to a lesser-known service.
On the last point, Reynolds does link to a Buzzmachine post that suggests that Google's marketing approach is not extensible. This doesn't mean the current "views and click-through" model is at any risk, however.
DesignBusinessArchitectural Thinking
This recent Business Week article calls Patrick Whitney, director of the Institute of Design (ID) at IIT in Chicago, a design visionary:
"Traditionally, design education is based on visual expression, and students learn through drawing, model making, and studying the work of other designers. That is still the case in most design schools. Little emphasis is placed on how design fits into a business context.
"Whitney pioneered a completely different model. The ID curriculum focuses directly on design strategy and innovation. Some 80% of the school's courses don't involve making things. User Observation & Early Prototyping aims at understanding consumers' wants, the crux of the innovation gap. In New Product Development, students also learn how to read a balance sheet. In Design Languages, they learn how to make effective business presentations. In Systems Design, students look at designing business organizations...
"'Most designers don't understand business," says John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. "Patrick has done more than anyone in crossing this chasm.'
ID graduates and faculty made a strong impression on me at ID's Chicago neighbor Doblin (www.doblin.com). On ethnographic research and innovation projects, designers combined forces with (for example) anthopologists from the University of Chicago and MBAs from Kellogg. Now, in addition to educating innovation-savvy designers, ID now offers a dual Master's degree with IIT's business school. From ID's web site:
"The first program of its kind in the world, IIT's MDes/MBA marks an important milestone in the co-evolution of design, management, and innovation. As design becomes regarded more and more as an essential business resource, professional education that links the two fields is becoming increasingly important."
Could a triple-Master's degree, adding anthropology or social psychology, be next? Whether companies acquire these skill sets by forming interdisciplinary teams, or by hiring a single cross-trained individual, more companies seem to be waking up to the benefits.
Unfortunately, Business Week applies a caricature of business schools to over-hype an already important point.
"Corporations have traditionally mined the best B-Schools for by-the-numbers managerial talent. But who really wants to hire people with masters degrees in "administration" when today's business culture demands managers who can master the process of innovation."
Historically, b-schools may come by their stereotype honestly, but equating today's top MBA programs with a 1950s-style "degree in 'administration'" isn't fair. More importantly, it's unnecessary. Programs like the one at ID are newsworthy and valuable even by today's standards.
For their part, many business schools are offering courses on innovation and contextual research methods along side the finance and economics. What ID would call design thinking, Toronto's Rotman School of Management calls "integrative thinking." This is more than another business buzzword: Rotman's integrative thinking pages contain seminar notes, videotaped speeches by Malcolm Gladwell and Jack Welch, as well as a coherent, detailed explanation of the term. See also: ID's collection of research and ideas.
"The truth is, there is no such thing as a 'tax decision' or a 'marketing decision'; there are only business decisions" --Peter Drucker
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
Cold Spring Harbor Protocols Launches on Highwire
Cold Spring Harbor has recently published its database of biomedical research protocols on Highwire Press. We're pleased to have designed the home page, banner, and icons for CSH, giving them a strong identity on the Highwire platform.
Chris Jackson Joins Dynamic Diagrams
Chris Jackson is our newest Information Architect. Chris has more than seven years of experience in software and web development as a technical writer, business analyst, and information architect, most recently at Boston University.
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