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by kunalb
4879 days ago
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I disagree with this post: there's another use case for visualizations -- consuming data as fast as possible to take action (eg firefighting). I work on tools for engineers, and I've found that a rich, non-standard visualization that people can learn to parse quickly after a tiny bit of initial acclimatization -- but showing them exactly what they need can help a lot. |
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I do a lot of UI work, also mostly for technical users, so I’m interested in both effective visualisations and efficient interactions built around them.
I’ve found that customised and/or contextual visualisations and interactions can be very effective if, but only if, they fit how the user thinks about the situation better than any of the standard alternatives.
Put another way, if you’re dealing with a solved problem, using the solution that everyone already knows usually works best. But if you’re dealing with something new and different, and you can’t build what you need cleanly using existing tools, then creating a new kind of tool often gets better results than cobbling something together with the wrong tools for the job.
The hard part is that creating more appropriate tools generally requires understanding your users’ mental model(s) of the situation and the actions they need to take, and even a seemingly small mismatch between what a user expects and what you actually give them can really hurt when the user doesn’t have familiar conventions to fall back on.
In practice, I’ve had some success building UIs around a small number of specialised visualisations and controls (typically making up a single main screen/page) but using only mainstream presentation like tables and histograms for supporting features, but every project is different.