Complex Diagrams

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There are many visualizations of social networks, most of which focus on who knows who. They provide a basic view with limited utility. Some visualizations refine this basic view by grouping areas of people who share common contexts (e.g. college, work, etc.). That approach can add some insight through the slightly increased complexity, but it is still a very limited view of the network.

This movie reveals more knowledge by showing not only which individuals know each other, but also when and how the social network formed, by calling out the contexts and individuals responsible for an introduction between two new friends. Visually representing more complexity allows the viewer a deeper understanding of the social dynamics and causalities involved.

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I’m very excited to announce that I’m technical editor for, and contributing a chapter to, the book Beautiful Visualization, due out in April from O’Reilly.

It is a collection of case studies and articles discussing how various beautiful information visualizations were achieved and how to create your own.

Stay tuned for updates as events warrant.

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Closing comments on this post, as it’s attracting a lot of spam. I’ll likely re-open it later.

This is a short story of user experience, information visualization, and design choices. I like Rivendell Bicycle Works for a lot of reasons (see below). However, one thing they don’t do particularly well is allow you to compare products on their web site.

When comparing a few randomly sorted parts, such as rear deraillers, looking at all 3 or 4 choices and then choosing one is relatively easy. When the choice is among 16 tire models in three rim diameters, various widths, some with various features (kevlar bead, anti-puncture, etc.), spread across three pages, in no particular* order, doing a comparison and then confidently choosing one is really, really difficult.

To address this sub-optimal user experience issue, I created this chart to make life easier for customers, improve the interface for comparing the tire offerings, and hopefully improve sales.

It allows the (potential) customer to quickly focus on the appropriate tires(s) based on desired rim size, tire width, and toughness/quickness, and then click the chart to go directly to the tire’s page. keep reading…

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VizThink ‘09 was awesome. I’ve come back exhausted, energized, and inspired, with a load of new ideas.

Thanks to everyone who presented, who attended my sessions, who asked good questions in all situations, who I talked with and listed to and shared meals with. It was a fantastic time. Special thanks goes out to the crew (and families of!) who put on the conference; I appreciate your hard work and perseverance.

As promised, here are the documents that support my sessions. The best online version of my User-Centered Information Design talk is the version from Infocamp ‘08, which includes narration. The only slides missing from that presentation are the design process guidance slides, which I’ve made into a handy PDF.

The snapshot talk on visualizing complexity was supported by this document.

As always, I’d love to hear from you about what worked, what didn’t, lingering or new questions, and anything else on your mind.

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[I'm justifying posting a recipe here with the thinking that good food is a good user experience.]

These are my favorite brownies. The recipe is shamelessly stolen (and modified) from the The New York Times and The Splendid Table. See those sites for advice on using baking parchment, fancy unpanning, adding nuts (blasphemy!) or frosting, etc. My additions and notes start with an *.
keep reading…

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Update: This post is all about how to get messages to actually delete from gmail when you delete them in Maill.app or on your iPhone, rather than having deleted messages saved in the archive, As Google Intended. If you like the idea of saving every message forever in the gmail archives, their setup instructions are 100% correct and you don’t need this post.

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This post was spawned by my frustrations with gmail, and my inclinations to save other people the effort of having to figure it out on their own.

Introduction: IMAP, Gmail, and You
IMAP is a mail protocol that allows continuous synchronization between a mail host and one or many clients; this is a Very Good Thing. For more on IMAP and why you should want to use it, see Google’s introduction, and the first part of this post at TechnoLawyer.

Gmail approaches mail differently than most mail hosts/providers. Rather than filing messages into single folders, messages can be tagged with any number of tags. The advantage of tags over folders is that a single message can be filed in multiple places, each one associated with a different tag. The Inbox is treated as another tag by Gmail. An unfortunate side-effect of this is that when most IMAP clients (mail applications) attempt to delete a message, Gmail removes the Inbox tag, but does not delete the message. The message remains in the archive for that account, and can been seen in the All Mail view. The only exceptions to this behavior are messages in Gmail’s Trash or Spam views; these messages do not appear anywhere else. When they are deleted from Trash or Spam they are gone forever. (Here’s a conceptually useful table of Gmail’s default interactions with IMAP client actions)

It is possible to configure Gmail and Apple’s Mail application to appropriately delete messages from Gmail when they are deleted in Mail. These instructions also show how to store all drafts and saved messages on the Gmail server, and how to configure your iPhone for the same behaviors. keep reading…

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This is the slideshow and audio from my Infocamp 2008 presentation on User-Centered Information Design.

The audio synchronization seems to work when played straight through, but not when you manually advance the slides.

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Should you be required to work in Visio, you may well find yourself, as I did, wishing to measure your drawing in pixels. I couldn’t figure out how do do it, though Visio does support such diverse measurements as Ciceros and Didots.

I finally found the definitive answer from Microsoft: For some types of drawings, you may want to change the measurement units to pixels. However, a pixel isn’t a unit of measurement. A pixel is just a dot on a screen and the size of the dot varies for different screens. To simulate pixels, set the measurement units to points.

Needless to say, this is not satisfying. It’s true a pixel is only an on-screen measure, and is clearly only useful for a few, obscure situations, such as when creating interface mockups, wireframes, or prototypes for software, the web, or any other sort of images meant to be viewed on a screen.

Luckily, Visio provides a set of features that allow a fairly simple, two step work-around. Warning: doing this on existing Visio documents may severely distort your existing drawings. I suggest working on duplicate files, not originals. keep reading…

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This is the talk I gave at Ignite Seattle 5, February 19, 2008. The Ignite format requires presenting 20 slides in 5 minutes, with the slides advancing every 15 seconds whether the presenter is ready or not. The original name for this format was “Ask Later.”

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I was just introduced to the Song Chart group group on Flickr. It’s full of visualizations of song lyrics. Many are clever, many are hilarious. This is my contribution.