December 26, 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:

USER EXPERIENCE
-  Sketching, Comics and the "Napkin" Look and Feel

INFORMATION DESIGN
-  Improving Excel charts

VISUAL EXPLANATION
-  The Visceral Timeline
-  Foodpairing Diagrams

DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
-  Contractors Needed for Research, IA, Interaction Design

 
USER EXPERIENCE

Sketching, Comics and the "Napkin" Look and Feel
Posted by Kirsten Robinson

Recently Mac attended a talk by Bill Buxton on sketching and he summarized the talk for the rest of our user experience team. Here is my "Father Guido Sarducci's 5-minute University" summary of Mac's summary of Bill's talk:

• Sketches are not prototypes. Sketches are quick, timely, inexpensive, disposable, and plentiful. They are used for ideation or "getting the right design." Prototypes are further developed. They are used for evaluation or "getting the design right."
• Bill encourages people to make at least 5 sketches and not to have a clear favorite.
• The rendering technique or fidelity of a sketch should communicate the level of doneness. In other words, the sketch should not be more refined than the idea.
• Leave holes when sketching to provide room for imagination.
• Sketches could be words, not images (think of comedy sketches). A user scenario is a form of word sketch.
• At Dynamic Diagrams, we tend to show our clients presentation drawings rather than sketches. But we use sketching internally to develop our ideas, before choosing the one that we will develop into a more robust design.

Our discussion about sketching reminded me of a couple of related topics.

In The Power of Comics: An Interview with Kevin Cheng, Jared Spool asks about Kevin's experiences using comics to communicate user experiences. Kevin notes that,

"One of the strengths of comics is that they're very condensed. It's almost like the whole picture is worth a thousand words. And a comic is just a series of pictures. Therefore, a lot of data can be condensed into the comic. I've found people tend to read these types of comics more often than requirements documents."

Napkin Look & Feel for Java is "a pluggable Java look and feel that looks like it was scrawled on a napkin." The developers recommended it for developing prototypes that are fully functional, but don't look too done.

I've experimented with hand-drawn sketches and low-fidelity wireframes made in Visio (try Comic Sans font to make Visio drawings look "sketchy"). I like that they are fast to create, and I also believe I get better, more comprehensive feedback from people reviewing my designs.

 
INFORMATION DESIGN

Improving Excel Charts
Posted by Kirsten Robinson

Recently I was preparing a presentation for a client to summarize the findings from a survey. I was frustrated with the appearance of the default charts from Excel -- ugly colors, slanted labels, a scale that went to an impossible 120%, and various other bits of chart junk got in the way of the data. After experimenting with formatting options, I was able to improve the appearance. Here's what I changed:

And here is the final chart:

If you'd like to try this yourself, you can find these formatting options by right-clicking on different parts of the chart. You can also modify settings in the chart wizard while creating the chart.

Now, if only I could save my preferences to use in future charts.

In case you were wondering, the survey question was, "How do you currently use the Web for teaching?" Teachers could select any or all of the five options. I converted the scale from raw numbers to percent of respondents to normalize the results between middle and high school teachers.

 
VISUAL EXPLANATION

The Visceral Timeline
Posted by Henry Woodbury

The opening credits of The Kingdom race through a century of Saudi Arabian history with a mixture of archival video, photographs, and animated text and diagrams.

It's a narrative aimed at setting the stage for the movie. So what's been left out?

(via GoodExperience)

 
Foodpairing Diagrams
Posted by Lisa Agustin

The Foodpairing web site takes a scientific approach to recipe creation. Diagrams of 250 ingredients show the major flavor components of each using a series of branches where ingredients with shorter distances between them have more in common. By selecting a flavor from each branch of the product diagram, the chef creates new and tasty combinations:

"If I want to reconstruct the basil flavour without using any basil...search for a combination of other food products where one contains linalool (like coriander), one contains estragol (like tarragon), etc.... So I can reconstruct basil by combining coriander, tarragon, cloves, laurel."

It's an interesting idea, making innovation in cooking less of a guessing game and more systematic.

 
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS

Contractors Needed for Research, IA, Interaction Design
Posted by Henry Woodbury

Dynamic Diagrams is seeking to develop new relationships with user experience contractors to supplement our full-time staff.

Please refer to the post above or to the Careers page on our web site for details.

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