Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The Beauty of Data Visualization (David McCandless TED talk)

I have to do a quick post about this TED talk from earlier this year. David McCandless talks about "The Beauty of Data Visualization". And it's beautiful. I've been digging around the newest website, "Information is Beautiful" having a lovely time examining all the truly lovely visualizations they've created.

I really do believe that pictures/visuals really are the next sets of vocabulary for communicating data. We have spent a lot of time in using words to describe data (and believe me, I love words), but there's so much power in a picture. And the visualization of data can give you an immediate grasping of context (accurate only if done right, of course) that words just can't quite capture.

For example, McCandless et al. produced a "Billion Dollar-o-Gram" in 2009 to give some context to those billions being thrown around. Go look at that for a second, and then come back after finding the cost to "Wall Street Revenue 2009", "Cost of Obesity Related Diseases", "Eradicate AIDS worldwide", and then "Worldwide cost of financial crisis".

McCandless talks about how the sometimes quoted "absolute figures" don't give you a whole picture - the relative presentation of data through visualization can give you a better view of the landscape. Visualization creates an information map for people to explore, and helps expose the hidden patterns among the data.

One comment he makes was interesting - he challenges the saying "data is the new oil" with a slight modification: "data is the new soil". It is this rich resource, and there is so much of it. We just have to figure out how to ask the right questions of it to get the answers.

"Let the dataset change your mindset" - the use of visualization is definitely a part of making sound decisions that can be backed up by data.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Design & The Platinum Rule

We have Alix Han (@uxkungfu) talking to students today about user-experience (UX).

You know the "golden rule": Do unto others as you would have them do to you.

Alix tells us the platinum rule of design: Do unto others as they would have you do to them...
What?

Well, it goes like this - you might like to be kicked, but that other person might prefer hugs. Seems a bit simplistic, but ....

Stealing some of the main points from her presentation, there are a few key elements that make up the desires/needs of humans and their interactions.

Talking About Emotional Design
Certainty: I want to know that things will work the way I expect them to
Variety: I want fresh, entertaining content
Significance: I want to feel special and important in some way
Love & Connection: I want to feel connected to someone or something

A designer's job is to research/discover how these come together and make a user's experience awesome.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

The Walking Schoolbus

A short column in the Seattle Times this morning by Nicole Brodeur made me hopeful about small changes that will hopefully have a lasting impact. The only information here is really the coordination efforts – I simply wanted to share something I thought was really nifty.

The article covered the “walking schoolbus” that goes to West Woodland Elementary school in Phinny Ridge every morning, coordinated by one man (a Mr. Glen Bradburn) and 18 families. Parents are in charge of “driving” the bus – they walk their kids to meet other parents and children, and eventually get all 22 children to school. Then they do it on the way back.

It’s a clever solution – it gets kids walking more (challenging the rising obesity levels in kids), also letting them work off some of that seemingly endless energy that makes it difficult for them to pay attention in school. It is a great opportunity for families to get to know each other in neighborhoods, helping people see beyond their own little bubble that is so comfortable to stay in. It saves on busing costs and petrol, is better for the environment, and is simply just a cool thing.

Going strong since 2005, this walking bus will hopefully continue to run and inspire other families/communities. There are apparently 18 other walking buses in the Seattle area – I hope they continue to grow.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Education and Innovation

Today the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced the Next Generation Learning Challenges, which is "a collaborative, multi-year initiative, which aims to help dramatically improve college readiness and college completion in the United States through the use of technology."

Sounds like a great initiative to me. Education is one of the issues that I feel very strongly about, but it doesn't get a lot of my energy, mostly because it often depresses me. But this is quite relevant for me right now, because I'm working with a colleague on refining a case study we wrote together about this very issue - how can the educational system benefit from the integration of technology, and successfully see that happen? How does an institution keep it's educational mission at the forefront of any initiative that brings about change? I think it's an interesting and critical problem, and it has to be taken seriously by parents, students, legislators, business owners, educators, and pretty much every citizen in the country.

In the press release, Bill Gates says “American education has been the best in the world, but we’re falling below our own high standards of excellence for high school and college attainment ... We’re living in a tremendous age of innovation. We should harness new technologies and innovation to help all students get the education they need to succeed.”

I think Mr. Gates has it right - we're at a pivotal moment in our education system's history, and how we deal with this is going to set the tone for the next few decades. We're not talking frivolous or secondary issues - we're talking about the education of generations of kids. The policy and investing choices we make today are going to have repercussions, and so we all had better take them seriously. I hope this movement from the Gates Foundation will help stimulate further dialogues about this issue.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Information & Making Decisions

Decision making can be a difficult thing. Sometimes it's simple "I wouldn't be caught dead in those shoes", a decision made on strong personal preferences without much thought or information needed. My experiences over time have shaped my shoe taste, and I don't really need outside information to make my decision.

But the majority of the time, making a decision is not so simple - numerous variables can catch us up in a game of trying to calculate tradeoffs and possible outcomes and consequences. I find myself going over the same problem over and over, imaging all the various things that could go wrong if I make the "wrong" decision. Over-thinking an issue can get me into trouble.

And then there are the decisions we don't even realize are important until later, and we go through the phase of "if only I'd known when I was making that decision that I would end up here with this result, I would have chosen differently".

It's easy to find oneself feeling paralyzed in the face of making a decision that can have seemingly unending number of outcomes and consequences.

Good information can help the decision making process easier. If we know more, we can make more informed decisions. Part of what I want to do with my degree in this field called information management is help make information more accessible, understandable, and sustainable for decision making in organizations.

Whatever the heck that means in the real-world. Still working on figuring that part out.