I’ve posted about this before, but apparently it’s a thing in systematics - the radial cladogram. Not only are they really cool, but the more I look at them, the more I realize they are a really excellent way to illustrate the relationships between species.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been working a lot on UIs for internal desktop applications at financial companies. It’s interesting work - it has some unique challenges and some great opportunities.
One of the challenges is that users usually perform very different tasks requiring specialized tools with complex data requirements. For example, researching a stock requires consuming research, news, technical information, market information, mathematical models, portfolio risk metrics, etc. Trying to put all of that in one application is usually chaos.
One of the advantages is that users are typically operating with multiple monitors. Two generous monitors at least; four is common; I’ve heard tell of eight.
So for several projects now we have advocated applying the latter to the former to create an independent windowing framework for complex application suites.
An illuminating issue came up on one of my projects the other day - one that touches on one of the inherent challenges of design in an agile process. That issue is re-use of features.
First, a little background. There are numerous broad domains in information architecture / UI design. You got your consumer web sites, ecommerce, application UI, etc. Another way to slice domains is by the dev/user ratio. For most consumer-facing sites or apps, your looking at a small pool of developers supporting thousands or millions of users. On the flip side are internal enterprise applications where the ratio is inverted. That’s where I’ve been working lately. Specifically for companies in the financial services industry. The organizations I’ve been working for have a hundred or so development and support staff maintaining apps for 10 to 100 users. These are core, mission-critical applications (can I sneak more business jargon in there? Let’s see… “strategic” - how about that?).
I’m still not done with this claim. I gave up after a couple of hours. I imagine I’ll be spending a good chunk of my weekend on this.I am currently trying to submit a claim for out-of-network services to my health insurance. I’ve done this before with my old insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and I thought that process was abstruse, but it wasn’t too odious and it got done to my satisfaction. Well, my company recently changed insurers and I now realize how spoiled I was. I would just like to take a moment to talk about the claim form I am faced with and what it demonstrates about the unfathomable levels of stupidity that humans are capable of.
A recent paper on miRNA got me thinking about when I started to get interested in the micro mechanisms of biology. Specifically, it reminded me of a fundamental misunderstanding that I had about biology that, when corrected, suddenly allowed things to make a lot more sense. It’s one of the cooler (and maddeningly illogical) aspects of molecular biology. I think that understanding it will help clear up a lot of people’s confusion about how genes and evolution work.
As I have mentioned, I’m an information architect. That sounds fancier than it is. Mostly I draw boxes. Some of the boxes that I draw are grouped into site maps.
Site maps are a visual representation of the organization of a website. Typically, that means the pages of a site, buy they can be used for content or UI features or other things. I am concerned here with the traditional page-based site map as often produced by web IAs.
And I am talking about them because they suck. They are not as valuable as people think. Why? Read on.
A warning: this is going to be very long and boring for anyone who doesn’t spend his entire day worrying about categorizing content.
Chris Gall, 2008 - MTA Arts for Transit
Peter Sis, 2001 - MTA Arts for Transit
I Went to the parents’ in NYC for Thanksgiving. While on the subway for an excursion, I was struck by a poster. It stood out not only because it wasn’t an ad for learning English, but also because it was whimsical and graphic (in a bold color and stroke sense, not the other way).
Turns out the MTA has had a program for years in which local artists create posters, murals, music, and more - all with a transit theme for display in stations, trains, whatnot.
New Yorkers who read this (I think there’s one of you) will find me late to the game, but I’m still pretty impressed.
These images here are two of my favorites. Check out the Arts for Transit web site for more.
By way of Information Aesthetics comes Web Without Words, which is a project to take a popular web site and reduce it to boxes to get a broad view of the site’s layout. It’s an interesting exercise. The initiated among you will recognize this as a crude wireframe. Normally, we don’t work backwards like this (take a design and wire it), but on occasion we do and it might be worth doing during projects as well.
If you reduce your design to blocks you can do a quick gut assessment of whether or not you’ve got your hierarchy right and it’s matching up to the original work you did on organizing that content in the first place. If it falls down, then do it again.
Of course, if you’ve read my previous rant about the problem with web design, then you would know that if you were doing design right, it would look an awful lot like the boxes anyway, so no need for the devolution exercise.
I’m a designer. Well, these days I get paid to be an information architect. But I am a designer by training. And a web designer by experience.
I also have an iPhone, and I’ve gotten into using Google reader to bring the world to my doorstep. Reader shows up on the iPhone in its mobile version (which I like) and I have opted to use the “Reformat linked web pages for mobile” feature (which I like a lot).
That feature alludes to everything that is wrong with the web.
A theme that seems to be running through my professional life lately is complexity. More specifically, the making of things more complex when you don’t really have to. Everyone does this (well, I think; it could just be me; I am given to overthinking things).
Am example: at work recently we were tasked with illustrating a design concept through a scenario. This gets done every day And every time we try to invent a new and better way to do it. That’s largely because I haven’t seen a good way to do it. And also because of the demonic grip of Powerpoint on our clients.
At any rate, what we came up with, via a feedback loop of overcleverness, was a system that would allow us to output our scenario as one big poster, as a PDF, or as images to build into a Powerpoint preso. All from the same artwork. I was pretty pleased with myself.
As you might guess, being outside the issue, our grand vision didn’t materialize and what we ended up with was a Powerpoint that was exceedingly complicated and tedious to modify.
What I thought was a smartly flexible system that would enable lots of different output formats became a beast that was efficient for none of them.
The lesson - which you would think was obvious but certainly wasn’t in this case: solve the problem you got, not every damn problem you can think of.
If we’d picked a format and moved forward, we’d be a lot happier. Sure, if the client wanted us to change later, we’d have a problem. But that wasn’t the problem we got.
