Appreciating the Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Posted At : November 28, 2008 3:02 AM
Related Categories: Spend Management

My long-time graphic / design consultant and friend, Nate Burgos recently penned a piece over on his blog Design Feaster about the process of designing the user interface for Metal Miner's new metals global pricing index, Metal Miner InDX(SM). Nate notes that when it comes to design, he starts with putting a pencil or pen to paper and that, "speaking of which, a blank sheet is my preference, rather than graph paper. Sketching on paper without lines is a better canvas to me. User interfaces are essentially layouts. With each iteration I played with the arrangement of the elements … The primary space would be for the criteria to adjust and search for pricing a particular metal; the other space would be dedicated for displaying the results … Building the webapp based on these sketches, we watched the user interface evolve as the actual visual and interactive factors were incorporated." Even though his words are focused on this one project, I think the process Nate employs is applicable for any organization thinking through the user-driven implications of their products. In addition, it also shows how practitioners should start to think through how users will actually interact with the systems they deploy. Overlooking this point has led, in part, to a range of failed SRM, travel booking, T&E and other related Spend Management deployments over the years thanks to UIs that turned users off.

- Jason Busch

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Great to see a post focusing on the UI aspect. I would like to add a point on the importance of copywriting as well, too often this part is neglected or completely separated from the visual layout design process - in the end this affect the end users just as much I think.

Other recommended resources on UI design:

37 Signals:
http://www.37signals.com/svn

Creating Passionate Users:
http://headrush.typepad.com/ (Not actively updated but lots of useful material)

Thanks for the tip on Design Feaster, seems to be a great read as well.

# Posted By Per Wendelboe Nielsen | 12/1/08 4:42 AM

I would like to see some mock ups of this if you have them as well as what backend framework that you built it upon.

Kendall Gordan, SE
www.foxfiresoftware.com

# Posted By Kendall Gordan, SE | 12/1/08 11:54 AM

This is a neat tool for site design.
http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups
It is a sketching tool.
By the title of this post alone, I thought the discussion would be more along the lines of Edward Tufte
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
or
http://infosthetics.com/
The Tufte course is very good. Highly recommended for helping to think about how to best present data and information.

# Posted By Mike Oswalt | 12/2/08 6:51 AM

Thank you Jason for another well-written piece! Anyone can slap data onto a surface and sell it. Handling data in a thoughtful way respects its subject matter and industry, and it ultimately respects people who engage it, from both ends of the interface. The architect Eliel Saarinen said, "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." This is a tall order and it connects with your call for companies to be sensitive about how people receive and use their products and services. Striving to make sensible user interfaces are an important part of this "larger context."

# Posted By Nate | 12/3/08 5:48 AM

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