Doing Business in Real Time
About this Blog:
The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
Five Inspirations for Turning Data into Information
One central feature of our real-time world is the flood of data it generates. It used to be only financial markets (stocks, commodities, futures) that generated this much data. Now things everywhere are generating continuous and growing streams of data. Cars, planes and trains generate data from their onboard computers; companies generate data from their internal application networks; satellites beam down data from orbit; and the Internet moves all this data from anywhere to anywhere.
It’s creating a huge need to turn data into information and make it easy for people to understand what’s happening. Systems can’t just show data dumps anymore. If it takes more than a moment to understand what the data means, then it’s useless, because situations change so quickly and there’s so much new data coming at us.
We need effective user interface designs if we’re going to rise above this swamp of data and make sense of it all. We need to quickly understand and act, not spend lots of time analyzing. That’s what it takes to be agile – just ask a stock trader – he who hesitates is lost.
There are lots of people who claim to be designers and they create lots of user interfaces for lots of systems. What makes some of them good and others not so good? Who’s to say if one design is better than another?
The reigning Grand Poobah of user interface design is Edward Tufte. In 1983 he published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and he’s followed that book with several more and with many lectures and seminars since then (check out his recent critique of the iPhone user interface).
I’ve read his books and taken some of his seminars and I come away feeling like I studied at the feet of the master, feeling like I heard great truth, and feeling pretty overwhelmed about how to start using what I heard. So I supplement my learning by talking to working designers who apply his principles and some of their own insights to create real-time user interfaces.
One such designer is Roy Nakashima. In an email recently, he articulated five points he calls “inspirations for turning data into information”. I love short and well articulated lists of pointers, so I’m quoting Roy’s email here:
1. Story Telling. I have to understand the task the user is trying to accomplish while they are looking at the GUI. If I can tell a story about someone using the GUI to accomplish a specific task, in the telling I discover how well the GUI met their needs. If you watch an old “Columbo” episode, you can see an example of how the detective uses story telling as a tool.
2. Visual Hierarchy. Not all information has the same importance. I try to reflect this in the visual presentation. More important information is emphasized by size, font-weight, position (top or left most), highlighting, contrast and color.
3. Composition. I compose a web page the same way an artist composes a painting, i.e. I pay attention to how my eye moves over the page. Then I try to optimize eye movement by putting certain things closer together and removing unnecessary visual boundaries that inhibit eye movement.
4. Rhythm & Structure. When I use repeating visual elements or grid structures, it creates a visual rhythm in the page that makes it easier for the user to anticipate where something of importance is going to appear.
5. Transitions. In architecture and
Previous Post: Memories of Our Lives, of Our Works and Our Deeds, Will Continue On in...Next Post: Boomers Moving On: Brain Drain or Wisdom Gain?
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
