Mick McQuaid

One of our papers this week discussed multiscale displays, addressing the problem arising when some features of the display need to be represented at different scales to perceive the detail in each feature. The above solution reminded me of this problem because of the attempt to balance detail about each team with the large number of teams and the need for a lot of space if each team’s path is represented by very many pixels. The five teams whose paths are shown here hint at this problem. They also suggest a preview of thinking about interaction. We might try to imagine the smallest number of interactions needed to provide an interesting picture of, say, historical rivals, geographic rivals, popular rivals, likely playoff pairings, or other configurations that may prove popular. When planning a shortcut, it’s always tempting to think of the steady state. What I mean is that, once the system is popular, it will be easy to determine what people want to see. What about that time before the system is popular (the only time most systems ever see!)? How do you make really good guesses before you have much data? How do you make the most of minimal data? How do you balance providing enough shortcuts for experienced users with providing a non-bewildering interface for first-timers.

Inspiration came to one team in the form of a cellular automaton discussed earlier in class. This raises, among other questions, where the inspiration meets the structure of information you want to represent. The cellular automaton we saw provided a convenient way to represent many specific points representing several nominal values. How does that fit into a configuration where we’d like to represent binary values (individual wins and losses) and values on two or three scales (comparative won/loss, payroll, and a hybrid of the two).

Color might work for comparisons between teams, particularly if we can find hot and cold colors to represent magnitude in the performance or salary domains. There’s room for a lot more exploration of this first step.

The tension between the need to diverge and the need to converge plays some role in every solution to a design problem. It looks like this group spent most of its time diverging, exploring the information and possible representations and interactions. Divergence strikes me as most useful when you can later review it and activate what you learned during a converging period. Does this display document what you did so that you can later re-engage? Can you explain this portion of the display to a casual observer? (By the way, I only snapped the right side of the board—on the left you can see the edge of their final design.)

One group described an animated avatar of a batter, sending a baseball along a path corresponding to some variable of interest. This kind of thing seems to rely a lot on execution. Would the batter be skinnable? Would you try for photorealism? Would you be able to cross the uncanny valley if you did so? How tightly would the batting integrate with the graph of the path? If I wanted to review a team’s performance, would I need to see another instance of batting? Who is likely to want to see batting over and over again?

Apart from execution is the question of how attached fans are to particular players. I’ve known people to admit that they play fantasy football, but I don’t know if there is an analogous phenomenon in baseball.

The representation above may be meant more to provoke discussion than to lead to implementation. After all, it directly challenges many of the guidelines we reviewed in our discussion of the normative perspective. Tufte even includes a similar map, decrying it with his familiar pejorative, chartjunk. One thing I like about this design is that it’s very carefully developed, so that if I want to challenge it, I can do so with more precision than I could with the less-developed sketches.

The main issue of interest is the choice of a map of states to represent 30 teams, many of which carry the names of cities rather than states and at least one of which is situated in Canada, outside the map area. A secondary issue is the choice of making the states “pop up” from the surface of the map in proportion to the records of the teams. The area thus extruded would be a function of the both the team’s record and the area bounded by states. In the case of states with more than one team, a tectonic plate scheme is demonstrated for the case of New York. This state is interesting because both teams are situated in the southeastern corner and may have nothing whatever to do with fans in most of the geographic area depicted. This problem was recently discussed on the website fivethirtyeight when Nate Silver tried to make a map of the new Congress. He wanted to maintain fidelity with two constructs he valued highly: the shapes of the states and their borders with their neighbors. Since most New Yorkers live in the Congressional districts in the southest corner of the state, it’s not easy to show representation (based on total population) and maintain shape and borders. Still, Silver’s map represents a thoughtful attempt. (See more here.)

(picture links to its creator's blog post about it)

Another challenge this representation faces is how to depict the payroll. The choice shown differs a little from the accompanying comments. Piggy banks are mentioned but what we can see is a series of dollar signs associated with each team. Note that the small boxes framing the dollar signs are of uniform size. The dollar signs themselves are so small that I found myself having to count them to compare the Mets to the Texas team. So in placement, size, and framing, I am discouraged from making comparisons.

Finally, let me comment on the “unreadability zone” chart at the bottom of the display. This chart purports to measure abstraction and complexity and to show a smooth curve between them. I don’t know what a chart of abstraction vs. complexity would look like, but I have no reason to believe it would be a smooth curve. I have absolutely no reason to believe that increasing abstraction and increasing complexity decreases readability. To convince me of such claims would require some kind of operational definitions and some kind of plausible test procedure to verify or falsify the claimed relationships. Casual perusal of science, and especially heatmaps of dna sequencing, convince me that quite readable displays (even for the lay person) are practical for some of the most abstract and complex data we can conceptualize. Nevertheless, I’m glad that this chart was attempted because you can reflect in a more articulate way by giving concrete expression to your ideas!

The above design really impressed me, but rather than praising it in class, I tried to highlight what might be problematic about it and suggest how you might investigate that. I did this by asking people questions about the display and I believe that the answers to these questions highlighted the deep-rooted tendency to believe that a circle represents turning or sequential representation. Some people did not immediately get that the pie slices were teams. Also, the spokes of differing lengths may have suggested turning, imbalance, or an intermediate state between resting states. You can work with or against these initial impressions, but you can’t will them away.

A couple of groups used the entire whiteboard. The above representation in particular used every inch of available space. This was also a very fully realized design, at the convergence end of the spectrum of time allocated to converging and diverging. The discussion of this design included some confusion about centrifugal force. I remember that someone said that centrifugal force would tend to push things to the outside of a turning wheel and that that would suggest that the winners would gravitate toward the inside as the hardest place to reach. This reminds me of the carnival ride where children sit on a spinning disk. As it spins faster, it becomes harder to hold on, but especially harder if you slip at all and go near the edge. The winner of this ride is the one who can stay closest to the center for the longest time.

This representation provides more area to show the losing teams if the spokes are marked off in equal lengths for each win or loss, but everything about the representation: the spokes, the wheel, the spiral of paths, all these things drive the eye toward the center, toward the team with the best record. So it seems like a fair trade-off to provide more space to the less successful teams but to place the more successful in the exact location to which the eye naturally moves. In any event, you can certainly divide the space up like a hyperbolic plane or with some other configuration to give more space to the items closest to the center.

The above picture elaborates on a similar representation from last week. How does it differ? The metaphor of sea level, reinforced with bubbles, fish, seaweed, and a giant clam (nice touch!) uses very little ink to make the point, a sign of strong draftsmanship. The fulcrum and lever portrayal of money and ranking is well-executed and drew a lot of attention during our discussion. One question that came up was whether the depiction reinforces or disputes our prejudices about the difference between money wasted and money well-spent. As shown, the wasted money has little or no weight, as if it’s ineffectual. Some people imagine wasted money as dragging down the team that wastes it, as a burden instead of a resource. It might be worthwhile to show this picture to a series of users and ask them what it means.

The final picture, above, adds something I didn’t notice in any other picture: the state of the world. The vertical line beneath the date July 8 becomes narrower as frugal teams win more and wider as spendthrift teams win more. This is an extra piece of information no one else (as far as I know) thought to represent. It’s interesting and easy to perceive. Well done!

There are some other things to praise about this depiction. One is that the definition of effectiveness is unambiguous because of the exceptionally clear presentation of the numerical expressions at the top of the display. There is also the reminder in the upper right that it would be easy to provide controls for this design, sorting the bands in different orders to allow more direct comparisons between different teams or sets of teams. The ability to portray differences is also spotlighted in the simple, effective use of crosshatching for some of the bands. Finally, it’s an economical use of ink, with just three effective arrows on the entire display.

I’d like to continue with our discussion last week about the application of ideas in readings to your projects. In that vein, I’d like to review the user / information material you’ve already shared and think about how that informs your next steps. You have a lo-fi prototype due next week. This, as those of you who know me are aware, can be done in ball-point pen on torn notebook paper. The fidelity of the prototype to your vision is not an issue. What is at issue is exactly what we’re discussing today, information representation. Later, you’ll have the opportunity to fully analyze the role of information representation in your project, but you have to start somewhere. You can present a straw man next week as a focal point for your further work.

ARMuseum

Museums are an endangered species. When we look at the museums that have been really successful in engaging visitors, they work on multiple fronts to popularize their offerings. One very successful museum has communicated metrics to me including “time spent engaging with an exhibit” as the most prominent metric. One question that pops into my mind is whether there’s anything you can do that will make people revisit an exhibit or engage in storytelling about an exhibit that will lead others to that exhibit. I personally don’t believe in the “saving favorites” bunny. My reason is that “saving favorites” in my experience has always meant a placeholder and placeholders always look alike. The tab visualization project is an example of trying to create a memorable object about what has hitherto been a placeholder. Therefore, instead of optimizing the placeholderness, I would work toward creating a memorable link to an experience.

I would seek to minimize interaction (in contrast to other projects). You’ll have more opportunities to think about interaction later on anyway and you may find that a little accelerometer control will be sufficient. One concern that museum people have about portable devices is that whether they will consume too much attention. You can gain the trust of these people by deemphasizing interaction.

One thing to highlight about your “functionality brainstorming” is your idea of a user-driven recommendation system. Just because I am the only person standing in front of an exhibit at a given moment, doesn’t mean I can’t be part of a crowd around that exhibit over time. How can you portray the entire crowd around an exhibit? I urge you to represent information that would be easy to collect. If your recommendations require a high intensity of interaction, entering them may drag attention away from the exhibit. Suppose, just as an example, you were to portray “hot spots” where the most people stood longest. Or suppose you were to collect dwelling-time information and load a slideshow of the visit, based on that dwelling time information at exit.

Tacoma Crime

Here the information representation issues seem to me to be able to help with some of the underlying information problems. The two that seem to loom largest are jurisdiction and geography. Different jurisdictions have different vocabularies and standards for measurement. The FBI tries to standardize practices nationwide, but these efforts are directed toward local police departments rather than citizens. Cash-strapped police departments find their resources stretched to accomplish their mission, of which informing the general public is only part. You may find that you have a competitive advantage in summarizing information across jurisdictions in that you don’t have to privilege any particular agency’s perspective.

The geographic issue is mainly that of points and regions. Crimes usually happen at very specific locations, but are reported as part of regions. This creates a representation problem. An important issue for police is gang activity and gangs are generally perceived as regional. Both representation of crime and gangs can be done by cloropleth maps or heat maps. Both of these representations make statistical assumptions. You have to think about your users and their use cases to inform these assumptions.

Change We Can Visualize

Information overload is central to this project. Nate Silver’s website demonstrates how vastly much publicly available information can be brought to bear on questions about Congress in general.

A serious problem for this project is the vast amount of unstructured relevant information. As an example, consider the news stories about the automaker bailout. Opposition crystallized in right-to-work states with Japanese auto factories. The relevant information to understand the dynamics of the arguments may be tabulated somewhere, but it’s mainly available in narrative form. Further, an important dynamic in this debate was the reliance of the right-to-work state factories on suppliers who would be undone by the collapse of the Big Three. This reliance led manufacturers in those states to signal that opposition to the bailout might adversely affect the constituents of the leaders of the opposition. How can you represent a story like this?

You may want to start by selecting a story and representing all the information in it in a single design. You might be able to develop and refine a model for giving an illiterate or semi-literate population access to information that otherwise would be available only to those we very high reading skilled individuals.

You may want to, at least at first, work on this from two fronts. One would be the representation of stories in a graphical form and the other would be the creation of hooks that let a constituent focus on preferred issues. The guidance given by some activists after the 2004 presidential election was that those dissatisfied by the outcome should select their top issue and join a group tracking that issue. Can you imagine how you could parse information so that any user could once specify a top issue and see its position on repeated visits?

TabViz

As I mentioned above, there is an opportunity here for linking to a memorable experience. You have started with some really great ideas in a different direction and I don’t want to take anything away from that great work. But it would be great to evoke the prior browsing experience in tabs. The feature in iPhoto for browsing folders and iMovie for browsing clips both come to mind, as does the thumbnail slideshow displayed at the Moving Image Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/movies).

People who study consumer behavior have formulas to make predictions. These formulas are often based on a weighted linear combination of three numbers, representing recency, frequency, and amount of purchases. You could easily cast visits to sites in this same way, collect this information and present tabs on this basis. Early on, you found that gmail typically occupied the left-most tab. This may have been an expression of a more general phenomenon, one that can be expressed by a formula like a recency / frequency / amount formula, that can be applied to tabs in general.

Buckets of Rain

Chuck Workman created several short films, such as 100 Years at the Movies (1994) with the theme of presenting a great deal of information about Hollywood in a very short period of time. In the above example, Workman displayed images from 225 motion pictures in about 9 minutes. It might be worthwhile to watch this and record your reactions (or the reactions of potential users).

One challenge we face in information visualization is the role of audio. If the central problem is to portray a person’s movie-goer identity, audio may figure prominently. Is that a visualization issue? Walter Murch says that sound is half of the movie-watching experience in an interview here.

Visualizing the CCEL

The Christian Classics Ethereal Library has some hallmarks of a typical network problem. One representation that immediately pops to mind is the Similar Diversity project, pictured at

(picture links to the similar diversity project)

or the visualization of words in conversation by Natalia Rojas at http://www.nataliarojas.com/p55/msn_history/. The difference between these two is that the second provides two completely separate representations, a cylinder and a strip, while the first tries to locate texts within one representation, so as not to privilege one over another. The user study in this case suggests a very clear consensus about the pecking order of the texts and the importance of age as a characteristic in that order.

OCWViz

Like the previous example, this project, visualizing learning paths through open course ware materials, may require two separate artifacts, one about the material avaialable and one about the paths being followed through that material. One question I’d like to pose is whether there is skeletal outline for learning such that the following scenario could be played out. A student searches for Pareto and browses through a number of hits on Pareto distributions and Pareto optimality, finally settling on a complete read through of “Power Laws, Pareto distributions, and Zipf’s Law”, an article by MEJ Newman assigned in Week 4 of SI708. After reading this article, the student wants to dig deeper. As you may imagine, that article could fit into a number of learning paths. There are places on the paths before the article where students would learn the background they need to understand it, as well as places where the applications appear in physics, statistics, economics, and other disciplines. In addition, there are places on the paths following this article, further studies building on it. How can you represent the differences between these paths and help the student find a desired next step?

Talk is CEAP

As with the “Change We can Visualize” project, this is a case where we may find unlikely allies in hard-to-reach places. The example I’m thinking of is the support for the Big Three bailout from rival automakers in right-to-work states. They saw a non-obvious threat to their suppliers and helped to attenuate complaints from their elected representatives. As in the “Change We can Visualize” example, much of the relevant information may exist in narrative form. Certainly data sources are balkanized.

The project has already identified the following as critical information: workshop details, statistical snapshots, plant closure information, contact numbers and email ids of important people, whats- going- on- in- the- community- now) and identified a mixed audience, some of whom won’t get access to all the information. The group has mentioned the map metaphor as a way to organize this information and what I’d like to see is a number of examples of maps that might help. Check out How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier (our library appears to have about 5 copies). Check out a “Techbeat” post about Apple’s Design Process in Business Week, posted by Helen Walters. In particular, consider the 10 to 3 to 1 guidance, where Apple comes up with 10 design mockups of any new feature before restricting themselves to three promising ones. Another guideline is to develop pixel perfect mockups to reduce ambiguity. A third is to pair a blue sky design meeting with a pragmatic design meeting, so that ideas are not stifled in the blue sky meeting and impractical ideas can be sidelined in the pragmatic meeting.

Web Visibility

There are two audience members, as far as I can tell, the Pure Visibility analyst and the client. These two are having a conversation about the visibility of the client’s website. They would like to have an artifact to refer to in that conversation. The conversation may be a kind of negotiation between these two interlocutors. The analyst’s contribution is more technical, while the client’s contribution is more domain-focused. The negotiation may be benefit from a representation like a SWOT diagram (a diagram with a good-bad axis and an internal-external axis, giving four quadrants named strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat), where items can be added and subtracted from each quadrant or even redefined and moved from one to another. Information objects may included competitors and words or clusters of words, as well as sites and clusters of sites.

Later, you will find yourself with information objects that the analyst and client may want to use in interaction, but for now, you may want to concentrate on identifying and positioning information objects that have some relevance to the decisions being made about the client websites.
Green Box

This project holds a special fascination for me as I have recently started to use widgets. I just acquired a computer (Raon Digital Everun Note) with a reputation for running at very high temperatures. Some users have posted concerns about the high temperatures to forums. They fear that the incessant high temperatures may be damaging to the device. Some are also questioning the environmental impact. As a result, I searched for widgets to tell me about the machine’s state, especially the temperature, but also other characteristics. I’ve always used processor monitor widgets on my Macs without consciously identifying them as such. It’s hard for me to imagine a computing environment without processor monitor widgets because I have been using them for so long. Now that I am looking for temperature monitors, I’m starting to appreciate widgets as a useful class of desktop objects and to see a lot of design opportunities and visualization opportunities for them.

Today I met a faculty candidate interested in using widgets to exchange collaborative information on the desktops of workgroup partners. He pointed out Plasmoids on KDE as an appropriate widget platform for putting things on the desktop.

Recently, I read about an iPhone app called Ocarina. A rave review is here. What fascinates me about this app is the way they’ve managed to get people to give up some privacy for some value. You might be able to get people to let your widget record, for instance, the websites they visit and give them an environmental score, assuming that some or much of their browsing is shopping related. How you secure that cooperation may be a measure of your talent.