Design & Reach

Following on from my last post, Mike Danziger and I chatted on email & he wrote up some impressions of the InfoVis conference. Stephen Few responded to some of the points, and a couple (1, 2) of subsequent postings, and some other comments (3, 4) have shown that people are interested. Sorry for being so late in responding myself – the day job sometimes gets in the way!

For me, the key contribution has been Pat Hanrahan’s. I feel the same way & I’m grateful to him for providing some academic respectability to what would otherwise just be my own opinions. From my own pragmatic software industry perspective, I’d like to say something about how his suggestions could be taken forward.

Delivery mechanisms are key: to appeal to the masses one needs reach. Interactive visualizations must be delivered to people’s eyes & to their fingertips. Static images in papers aren’t enough: people don’t have much time or patience & won’t enjoy having to read lots of text in order to learn how the interaction works.

One approach is to put good visualization capability into commonly used tools such as Excel (1). That way people can manage their data themselves. Because the user has the ability to load and edit the data behind the visualizations this means a high degree of skill is needed when crafting the software so it has the necessary flexibility. Each tool has different extension points & platforms. In practical terms this means a software company is forced to choose a very small list of supported environments & work flows.

The more obvious route is to exploit the immediacy and universality of web delivery mechanisms. Thanks to Flash, Silverlight & Java there is a huge audience out there with suitable runtimes. It is good to see more and more experimental visualizations using these. (Though problems with data management are still there of course…)

Reach isn’t enough: in order to bring something compelling to people one must embrace designers. Graphic designers, user experience designers, interaction designers, the works! The right kind of designers can keep a visualization clean, useful & informative but also imbue it with style, panache & memorability. There is a design revolution happening now in the software industry & it will sweep up information visualization tools along the way.

The combination of the need for reach and good design is the main reason why I’m so interested in the Adobe platform. Because they already have designers using their tools, they don’t need to woo them to new platform. Add a massive install base (flash) and increasingly workable languages (mxml, as3) and it is hard to dismiss. Nice to see I’m not alone in thinking this.