Running as Root

More Tales of the Expert User

Another thing I noticed during the expert user presentation was how he used the information in the application. He leaned heavily toward using the charts and graphs in the application rather than the tables. From his viewpoint, the tables were useless. He didn't care about 99% of the individual incidents in the tables. He just wanted to see the overall trends. Multiple pieces of information were presented as different components of a single graph with a vertical line cursor that allowed him to compare the timing of different events from different mini-graphs. When he found something out of the ordinary he could click and drag to view a table version of a point in time. This is vastly superior to what I normally see–disconnected table and chart views with the tabular format being the kitchen sink view of things.

The point is that I normally witness user interface design happening in a complete vacuum. UI features are thrown in just like product features, just put everything in there because some of this is going to be useful to someone. Hopefully. Maybe. Now I haven't been here long enough to know how that UI was conceived, but this is certainly another example of the importance of mining your users for information. It's not only important to know what they need, but how they intend to use it.

Hey, Look at Me! I Read a Book

A case in point, I'm reading Things That Make Us Smart and the author uses several really good examples of the representation of information affecting the ease with which certain tasks can be performed. One example from the book is the case of Roman numerals, ticks, and Arabic numerals.

Supposedly it is easier to perform addition with Roman numerals than the other two systems. Read the Wikipedia explanation to see it in action. This is apparently easier to learn. Fortunately I'm too heavily indoctrinated into our current system to tell if it really is. A good thing since multiplication and division would obviously make my wiener hurt.

Ticks are superior for counting or tallying things. This is because their representation of larger numbers is additive. You just add another tick. With Arabic numerals you have to completely change the symbol you're using. This means erase and redraw. Not very efficient for the use case of counting.

And Arabic pretty much kicks the ass of the other two in everything else. But the point is that each of these representations are superior to the others depending on what you are using them for (although I will never use Roman numerals even if I'm only doing addition).

Give Them What They Didn't Even Know They Wanted

Apparently the king of information and interface design is Edward Tufte. I've only seen a few examples of his stuff, but it is very sweet. On top of this there are courses available to learn to improve your presentation of information. Everyone I've talked to that has attended raves about their sheer brilliance. I've decided I'm attending the very next chance I get. It's a step toward the final piece of the puzzle which is knowing how to not just get the information the user wants but to know how to present it to them in a manner that greatly facilitates their understanding and usage of it.

Now that's something that should impress customers and make you stand out from the competition…

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 25th, 2006 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Business, Programming, Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.