Juice Analytics

For every Edward Tufte and Stephen Few telling us how data should be presented, it is a pleasure to find someone like Jonathan Harris who shows us the possibilities of data presentation. Jonathan brings a level of creativity and imagination to data visualization unlike anyone else I’ve ever seen. His bio is a little more expansive:

Jonathan Harris is an artist working primarily on the Internet. His work involves the exploration and understanding of humans, on a global scale, through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web.

I first ran across his work at a popular link to Princeton’s International Networks Archive. There I found a gallery of attractive infographics all attributed to him. He is an example showing the global tobacco trade:

Now I enjoy a densely-packed infographic as much as the next data junkid, but the masterpiece of Jonathan’s collection of interactive data-art has to be a site called We Feel Fine. The site gathers textual data from blogs and presents the results through an interactive, Flash-based interface. The mission statement explains:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

Working with Sepandar Kamvar, Jonathan has created an wonderful interface for navigating and exploring this “feeling” data. We complained here about how enterprise applications can’t seem to keep up with consumer reporting interfaces—these guys have just raised the bar. A few things that I find brilliant about this interface:

1. The navigation and controls are both easy to understand and engaging. It made me think of that “close to the road” feeling Car & Driver likes to rave about when reviewing a BMW. Here’s a look at the demographic chooser:

2. They recognize and celebrate the individual pieces of data while allowing for aggregation of results. Throughout the application, individual “feelings” are represented as energetic little circles or squares. Clicking one brings up detailed information—the sentence in which the feeling was found. Below you’ll see that that they used these granular data elements to create a column graph to show the “feeling” split by age.

3. Finally, they make data exploration fun. They feed the user’s curiosity with tangible and lively of data, unexpected touches, and the overall design. One lovely surprise: the mounds that make up the graph below have a fantastically frivolous Jello-like behavior that you can manipulate with your mouse.

For more on Jonathan Harris, check out other web sites he has been involved with…

• Phylotaxis
• 10×10
• Justcurio.us
• Lovelines
• Wordcount

…or his companies

• Current: Number 27

• Past: Flaming Toast

If I could influence the future of business intelligence tools (wait, maybe I can), I would put a premium on “tangible” data manipulation. I’d design interfaces that let users touch, play with, and sculpt data as an object.

Many data crunching applications, particularly those focused on statistics (e.g. SAS), tend to separate the user from the act of data manipulation. The user defines a set of scripts or formulas, points to a data set, and let’s the application take over. For a programmer, this type of abstraction works. For non-technical business folk, it limits our ability to understand what is happening and why the result turned out differently than we imagined.

Here are a couple interesting examples of computer interfaces that attempt to merge real-world touch and feel with digital-world manipulation of information:

Via Information Aesthetics

What if BI interfaces brought an artisan’s mentality (I’m imagining glassblower for some reason) to data manipulation? Data is the tangible raw material. When there was something odd or imperfect in the raw material, it would be obvious on visual inspection. We’d have access to a variety of tools, some for broad and crude actions, others for a more delicate and subtle actions. These tools would be put in physical contact with the data to shape it. Finally, we could add a final aesthetic finish to our creation. Analysts could take pride in creating digital objects that could move and influence others.

Related thought: can we blame the poor visualization of analytical results on the lack of visualization in the data analysis and manipulation process?

One of our current projects it to design or re-design the user interface for the next generation of one of our client’s products. While talking with the designers and engineers, you wonder why the people with the deepest understanding of the product aren’t always the most qualified to design the interface.

The biggest challenge of designing the UI of a complex system is that as you become comfortable and knowledgeable of a design, the harder it is for you to accurately assess how simple and intuitive it is. How do you account for this? By constantly bring in fresh eyes at all aspects of the design process. The longer you’ve been toiling over a feature, the less likely that you yourself notice a glaring design flaw.

The Wisdump blog recently did a design critique of Odeo. They made some good points but specifically thought that the sign-up form was too simple. 37signals did their own critique of the site but arrived at the opposite conclusion.

These are two intelligent and experienced teams (it’s not like any schmuck straight out of college can get his own blog) with an above average sense of what makes a good user interface for a website. But they both saw the same site and disagreed. I think a big reason why this happens is that it’s hard to separate the elements of design related to organization and the elements related to aesthetics.

Joel makes a point about this in his series on good design. However, I disagree with his point that aesthetics can only enhance a design and not take away from it (imagine if your Ipod was puke green). He’s on the right track: good design is a two dimensional problem. One dimension is related to organization and engineering and the other is aesthetics.

Shouldn’t the engineering aspect of it be more objective? If UI is engineering, than it should be more than just a variation of “hot or not“.

One of the main elements that lead to good design is the issue of prominence. What parts of a website are the most eye catching to a user and what elements belong in those prominent locations. As I see it, there are four elements that go into how prominent something should be:

• Value to the user: How much does this feature enhance the users experience and interaction with the site?
• Value to the site: How much does the site need this feature to function properly?
• Simplicity: How simple is it for the user to learn or use this feature?
• Attractiveness or convenience: How much does this feature engage the user with the site?

Next step: Is there a way to quantify these factors in order to look at UI in a more subjective way?