A slideshow at Slate: “How artists are mining data sets to make you see the unseen…. Display an unwieldy mass of data in clever visual form and you may gain über-insight into questions you hadn’t yet put into words. That is the promise of information visualization, infoviz for short. The field has long helped scientists, engineers, and businesspeople see the unseen as it emerges from complex data: Users may spot promising molecules for pharmaceutical testing, for instance, or pinpoint glitches in a supply chain. As infoviz has matured, it has also caught fire as an art form, its center of gravity edging further from the pragmatic and closer to the expressive or the whimsically profound.”

“The sketchboard is a low-fi technique that makes it possible for designers to explore and evaluate a range of interaction concepts while involving both business and technology partners. Unlike the process that results from wireframe-based design, the sketchboard quickly performs iterations on many possible solutions and then singles out the best user experience to document and build upon.”

“The history of the modern info-graph starts sometime in the 17th century, and was closely linked with the development of methods of statistical analysis (early graphs show simple distribution curves of statistical data.) But it wasn’t until the 18th century when data visualization really took off, and people started to develop methods that we still use today.”

“Cartographies of Imagination, by me, Sarah B. Nelson, is about navigating the world of collaboration, through methods, tools, techniques and ideas. I’ll share methods, tools, and ideas to inspire you to draw on the collective wisdom around you. I’m an interaction designer and design strategist at Adaptive Path.”

“Over the past month at Planet Argon, I’ve been taking on more interaction design work. Mostly because there’s a gap to be filled with all the design work on our plate, but also because I said I was willing to take it on. Visual design to interaction design doesn’t seem like a huge transition on the surface (it’s all design right?), but it has really been a challenge.

Maybe I’m still hanging out in the web standards design blogosphere too much, but finding IxD & IA blogs to read have been few and far between. The ones I have found get updated once every 8 months or so. In an effort to spread the knowledge, here are some initial thoughts and experiences from an IxD n00b…” (Thanks Airbag!)

“Under the guidance of experienced practitioners from Adaptive Path and other top companies, this four-day conference introduces user experience practitioners to new rich internet application design approaches, practical prototyping techniques, effective cross-organization communications strategies and more.”

“It’s been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. I mean really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style. Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking.”

“Can an interactive web site produce false memories? Possibly so, according to a fascinating paper to be published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research by Ann Schlosser, a business professor at the University of Washington. Schlosser performed an intriguing experiment: She took two groups of people and had them check out two different web sites devoted to the same digital camera. One site included static pictures; the other was interactive, allowing users to play around with a virtual version of the product. Later, she tested them on their ability to recall details about the camera. She intentionally included details that were false, but sufficiently plausible that they might have been true. The result? The people who viewed the interactive demo of the camera were much more likely than the folks who’d only viewed static images to ‘remember’ the false details as being present. Or another way of putting it: The interactive demo was more likely to produce false memories of the product — potential buyers who thought the camera could do things it can’t.”

“Affordance is one of the more important elements of design; one closely tied to usability. In fact, without proper affordances the rest of the design doesn’t matter — it will simply fail, partially or entirely. An affordance is a property of an object or environment that indicates how it can or should be used.”

“Embedded in Management Information Systems, sparklines efficiently add context and reduce the recency bias prevalent in data analysis and decision-making. Sparklines enrich data displays on mobile devices and are a prerequisite for effective mobile controlling concepts… In order to enable a wide public to benefit from sparklines, we offer an Add-in for Microsoft Office that creates sparklines. The sparklines are generated either as bitmaps or from specifically crafted TrueType Fonts (TTF), the Bissantz SparkFonts, which allows for continuous scaling and razor-sharp printouts.”

“The role of metaphor in interaction design has oft been maligned and usually misunderstood. Metaphor has been called ‘not only unhelpful, but harmful’ (Cooper, 1995) in design, and is typically thought of as being limiting, scaling poorly, and leading to faulty thinking about how products work.”

“One of my colleagues at Adaptive Path often refers to design as being derived from user research. I can certainly see how one would come to that conclusion. In many of our projects, we’ll do a bunch of user interviews, generate a model based on the analysis of the transcripts, and map an architecture to that model. That becomes a foundation for the web site, and thus the user experience. I believe in this approach, but it’s just not at all how I work. Rather, I find my designs are more often inspired by research. I find that the best designs I’ve created are produced more like writing songs or short stories than conducting an experiment using the scientific method. They just hit me. So it was revealing to read Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’ in which he discusses split-second decisions…”

From ACM’s Ubiquity: “Mary Czerwinski is Senior Researcher and Group Manager Visualization and Interaction Research Group at Microsoft Research.”

“By making a conscious effort to integrate narrative into our work, we are better able to support creative learning, problem solving, and task completion by the people who use the things we build.”

“The Wall Street Journal’s venerable Walt Mossberg spends some time with the unattractively-named Network Walkman NW-HD1 from Sony, and compares it to Apple’s fourth generation iPod. And he finds that the product’s name is the least of its problems.”