Most applications depend heavily on displaying data using tables. The table component designed effectively can give your user so much of needed functionality to reduce their burden. I was doing a self imposed project of learning whats available on the internet that guide us better.
Principles while designing table columns,
Links that could help you,
Information visualization is an interesting science helping simplify complex layouts into visual representation. There is a saying somewhere humans connect to visuals faster than raw data. What interests me further is bringing in direct manipulation to help change the visuals. To cite an example lets say you were looking at your organization compensation data and it somehow looked skewed. To correct it you might have to go to individual records and update it.
Providing a uniform update without context can be dangerous hence through the normal means it might be difficult to update the records. Lets now look at a different approach- using visualization techniques you make the data far easier to read, you now know where it is skewed and where to fix the issue and how much to fix the issue. You also have a pattern in mind that you want to fix. Fixing it directly using direct manipulation will make your job even easier.
Can i represent what i say in images. hmm… thats lot of work. I will do that in coming posts.
How do you make a mundane task interesting to users of complex systems. The answer is not easy. For one you could improve the usability attributes, you could make it more aesthetic. OR go a little further and try making it engaging with Game Mechanics. I have often wondered on how to make tasks more interesting that are mundane by nature. For example filling in your timesheets. Isn’t it the most boring of tasks. I remember having donned the role of a resource manager in one of my previous companies. How crazy it is to run behind people to ensure they complete their timesheets in time. Could this be a game. Could it reward people based on being accurate and timely.
Am trying to design a process that can be utilized to develop gamify interfaces. Going beyond the usual badges and points. Really thinking it out. Some of the books that i have been reading include,
I will update this post further as i collect and digest more information.
A lot of organizations these days interview user experience candidates asking them to provide a possible solution to a problem in form of a test. I was fortunate enough to take a few tests and made my share of mistakes. The learning has helped me advance better in my profession giving me a methodology of sorts to solve design solutions quickly.
The criteria
• The solution should be arrived at within a few days time,
• Should exhibit your knowledge of UX methodologies,
• Should provide a set of assumptions that you have used to arrive at the solution,
• Provide good design documentation.
Design Solution
So here is my take on how a design solution documentation should be structured,
1. The challenge: A clear brief of what you are supposed to do. Can be in form of notes you have taken or any written tasks you have got.
2. The methodology: Describe the steps you would take to design the solution.
3. Assumption & Issues: The brief must leave open a few gray areas requiring you to make assumptions. This is a good place to describe your assumptions.
4. The BUS Model: The Business, User and the System model – what are the challenges and needs in each of these.
5. Scenario: Identify story like scenarios where the user performs a few tasks.
6. Personas: Build life like personas with motivation, goals and a typical day.
7. Task Analysis: List down tasks or activities the user would perform.
8. Information architecture – Create a information architecture schematic detailing how the user can complete tasks.
9. Wireframes – Start with basic wireframes. Keep them as low on color as possible.
10. Design Rationale – Include your notes on the design rationale for the wireframes. Why you choose one layout over another. What are the primary tasks you hope your design will solve.
11. Visual Design – Create a high fidelity version of your wireframe displaying your aesthetic skills.
12. Usability Engineering – Describe what type of Usability Engineering activities could enhance your tasks.
Am enjoying my time reading this book. The book seems to stand apart in its insights about what makes organizations great in their results. Most books i had read about before spoke about how great corporate heroes changed the destiny of the organizations. This book balks down on the hero culture of corporate head honchos.
Jim Collins conducted thorough research in non-IT industries studying what helped companies achieve great result over a period of time. Some of the insights include – the type of leaders that would make companies sucessfull, the type of people to be part of, what type of people to keep and what type to let go and more.
Information visualization helps display information with an interesting angle. Information that might seem mundane in the normal text format starts appearing interesting. A similar approach was adopted by ‘Visualize.me’ to display professional resumes using smart information visualization. To do this ‘visualize.me’ connects to linkedin and pickups the data from there to display. How successful was their approach let’s give it a second look at ‘all above the hood’.
The Visual display is broken down in the ‘information display’ area and the ‘configurable’ area. The information display area includes – Experience, Education, Interests, Awards and Honors, Recommendations and links. Most of these appear to be rather simple display of charts on timeline or quantity.
What’s Good?
The application seems to be simple but error free. The configurable options are elegant and a lot of thought seems to have gone through them.
What’s missing?
This application is supposedly designed to challenge the traditional resumes. Although the resume are mundane as you read. These do contain a lot of information that helps you decide whether a profile is suitable for a position or not. In that manner this application merely scratches the surface. It could do more.
What more could be achieved
How was one position different from others? What are the projects linked to an experience? What was the job title for a position? There are some interesting aspects that seem to be missing. Information visualization is often rich by the insight these offer. Visualize needs to improve on this. My suggestion is to provide the ability to add more detail to the information that is already displayed. Provide hover links and the ability to drill deeper would be some great functionality.
Facebook has come up with up a novel content filter for displaying updates from different categories of friends. It has been docked between the ‘Favorites’ and ‘Apps’. On the first go this list includes – Close friends, Family, Your Company, Your College and your Location. You can customize your list by hovering over the Lists link which displays the ‘More’ link to a variety of lists. What’s more every time an update appears within your lists, you get a number next to the related list.
Isn’t this a smart idea? Yes it is. This kind of mirrors a feature in Google plus that enables users to filter content updates by different categories of contacts. This included Friends, acquaintances and others. Facebook has learnt things from its rival fast and improved upon it.
What’s in it for interaction design?, to begin with this smart concept can be reused when we come across places where different categories can be created based on the facets of information. Instead of just providing the ability for the user to create a category, we could pre assign categories based on available information. For instance in a phone directory, we could pre assign lists based on locations or any other possible information that has been provided before. There could be interesting applications in the world of enterprise products such as human resources which deal with large number of people related information.
It would be interesting to observe the usage of this type of a widget by users of Facebook.
