Color. We’ve been chasing this topic for a long time. It’s important. It can be tricky. And now, it’s on the virtual seminar program. And we couldn’t have a better person to cover it for you—Molly Holzschlag. Designing with color often is a matter of personal preference. But your success in designing a usable, accessible, [...]

A data visualization, when done well, can be an incredibly powerful way to communicate information. It ultimately boils down to the choices you make in how to design and present the data. If you make the wrong choice you can run the risk of not accurately displaying the data or struggling to effectively tell its story.

The right data can be more effective than words when it comes to telling a story. Even if you have the data, you have to present it in the correct manner. Choosing the right axes, colors and placement are all a big part of putting together a great visualization. Noah Iliinsky demonstrates what goes into creating an effective visualization.

A common trap in designing data visualizations is focusing on all the different ways to represent the data, rather than the questions that the data should answer. The presentation of a data set is pointless if it’s not useful, usable, or if people can’t understand it. With so much data to choose from how do you keep the goal of the visualization in mind? How are you sure you’re telling the right story?

There’s definitely an advantage to having your users understand data and messages through a picture versus reading a series of sentences. Information visualization, when done right, can have a greater impact. In many ways, data visualization will take a message and make it more succinct. A good visualization can simplify the most complicated data, and [...]

[We've built this year's User Interface 16 Conference around eight important challenges facing today's UX Professionals. This is the first in a series of posts where I discuss my thoughts on those challenges and how I came to pick the expert who will be your guide at UI16. Enjoy! – Jared] What happens over time [...]

“There are no problems, only opportunities. However, there are some insurmountable opportunities.” Just when we thought we knew what we were doing, suddenly we realize everything has changed. We thought we had finally mastered building great applications on the desktop, only to realize that we now have to challenges of the mobile platform to deal [...]

Information Visualization uses the brain’s innate ability to recognize patterns to create visual representations of data. When you see a great visualization, it’s as if you are looking through the eyes of an expert. Noah Iliinsky gives examples of the types of visualizations in common use, why and when they are useful, and how to think about different types.

Translating information and data into a useful visualization is challenging. When creating information visualizations, as with any design process, it’s imperative to keep your audience in mind. With quality visualizations, they can understand and analyze complex information. In this podcast, Noah joins Jared Spool for a discussion about how to interpret information visually in a way that is most effective for users to process the information and be successful in their tasks.

Nothing reminds me more about the power of what we can do with our data than this TED video of PatientsLikeMe‘s Jamie Haywood, talking about how they change people’s lives with incredible data visualization tools: Here he tells the story of his brother and how it inspired him to look into the data of 45,000 [...]