July 25, 2007
Information Design Watch
From Dynamic Diagrams
Design for Understanding
All of these articles first appeared on our Information Design Watch blog. Please visit the blog to view additional entries not included in the newsletter. You also can register and comment on most posts.
In This Issue:
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
- IA and RIAs
MARKETING
- Is Marketing the New Finance?
VISUAL EXPLANATION
- Visualizing Network Dynamics
- All Fundraising is Local
- Graph Design I.Q. Test at Perceptual Edge
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
IA and RIAs
Posted by Lisa Agustin
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) enable a user experience that's more responsive and sophisticated than traditional HTML. But does crafting the RIA experience differ that much from architecting a traditional web site? Yes and no, says Adam Polansky in the latest asis&t Bulletin. Polansky, an information architect for an online travel company, was tasked with producing a trip planning application that had originally taken shape as an exciting proof-of-concept Flash demo, but which had not been scrutinized in terms of scalability, usability, or actual user needs.
Before moving forward, Polansky took a few steps back by employing traditional IA exercises such as wireframing (adapted to a more interactive experience) and usability testing to validate the direction and identify the holes. Besides pointing out the similarities and differences between building web sites and RIAs, he offers a good shortlist of pitfalls to avoid, including the potential for increased revision cycles and building interaction at the expense of content. I would tend to agree with him on both fronts. In our practice, we've found that constructing process flows and annotated wireframes are key to keeping everyone on the same page about the intended user experience and the possible trade-offs between vision and feasibility. These activities ease (if not eliminate) any worry of creating interaction for its own sake.
MARKETING
Is Marketing the New Finance?
Posted by Henry Woodbury
Here is economist Hal Varian, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal:
WSJ: In the past, promising new economics PhDs who didn’t want to work in government or academia probably aspired to work on Wall Street. In the future, will they aspire to work at companies like Google?
Varian: I think marketing is the new finance. In the 1960s and 1970s [we] got interesting data, and a lot of analytic fire power focused on that data; Bob Merton and Fischer Black, the whole team of people that developed modern finance. So we saw huge gains in understanding performance in the finance industry. I think marketing is in the same place: now we’re getting a lot of really good data, we have tools, we have methods, we have smart people working on it. So my view is the quants are going to move from Wall Street to Madison Avenue.
And it's all thanks to Google. According to Varian, the business model for search is not much different than the business model for publishing. The difference comes from Google's ability to manage pricing on a real-time basis and thus transact an enormous amount of data. Here's Varian again:
Adaptive forecasting, how I revise my forecast to take account of updated information, you use that a lot on Wall Street, where you have time series of stock prices. And some of those things carry over into things that Google is doing, that have this real-time flow of data. How do I detect unusual events, and react to them?
The internet gives us an engine. Now we start figuring out what fuels it.
VISUALIZATION
Visualizing Network Dynamics
Posted by Lisa Agustin
The submissions from this year's Visualizing Network Dynamics competition (part of the larger NetSci07 meeting) represent an intriguing collection of the different ways to represent the complex structures of dynamic networks. A mix of both movies and still visualizations covering a wide range of subjects, including citation pathways in BioMed Central, ideological alliances on the Supreme Court, and editing patterns on Wikipedia (above), the entrants all set about to map real world networks that are dynamically evolving over time in response to their usage. This year's winner was Aaron Koblin's Flight Patterns Movie, an animation of North American flight travel paths based on aircraft data collected by the Federal Aviation Administration. Set to music, this hypnotic visualization offers insights on multiple levels, including the environmental. According to one of the competition's judges: "In an age of climatic crisis and carbon footprints, the [patterns] are rhetorically powerful as ecological visualizations showing the almost absurd degree of mobility in the USA."
All Fundraising is Local
Posted by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times provides an interactive visualization of U.S. presidential campaign fundraising. Click on a candidate to see their activity. Click on a time series at the bottom to watch fundraising over the last six months.
The results are not surprising. Every candidate raises a lot of money in their home state: Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guiliani in New York, Barack Obama in Illinois, Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
But Mitt Romney does better in Utah than Massachusetts and draws well in Michigan, reflecting, I assume, his religious and family connections. Meanwhile Clinton leads all fundraising across the country, but Obama does significantly better in Denver. Denver?
The visualization does not explain. Designed to fit the narrative of fundraising as horse race, it has no revelatory power. What demographics apply to the numbers? How does local fundraising compare on a per-capita basis? What accounts for high points in the time-series data? Is the spike for most candidates at the end of March an artifact of reporting requirements or something else? You can either backfill your own research or wait for the next feature story.
Graph Design I.Q. Test at Perceptual Edge
Posted by Kirsten Robinson
Stephen Few at Perceptual Edge has posted a Graph Design I.Q. Test. It's not difficult, but it does make you stop and think about your past sins.... Who among us has not been tempted by Excel's 3D capabilities?
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