Data Visualisation - User Experience Design
<P>There's so much data online - how do we present it so it makes sense? How do we make it interesting and useful?</P>
Since this year’s Webstock I’ve been mulling over various topics and concepts. Of particular interest to me was Toby Segaran’s presentation, entitled Beautiful Data.
Attempting to get our brains to grasp the huge amounts of data which is being served up to us online is becoming more and more challenging. This is where information visualisation and presentation techniques can make all the difference, allowing us to see information that we are seeking in a more interesting and useful manner.
The main goal of information or data visualisation is just that – to visualise data and communicate information clearly and effectively. The goal is to convey both form and function to aid the customer experience.
Data presentation affords the opportunity to be visually interesting and descriptive at the same time. There are of course a variety of common ways to visualise conventional data, from tables to pie charts. But to bubble-up and utilise visualisation techniques for a visual user interface (UI), you need more than just a simple pie chart to illustrate and communicate information needs.
So what innovative ideas are we already using for our customers and what are the most creative approaches to present data?
At Intergen we have recently been investigating where the digital and retail worlds converge and how this affects the all-important customer experience. The underlying principle of User Experience Design where having a thorough understanding of your customers’ needs and goals remains paramount. When it works well, customers have a seamless, usable and integrated experience.
Emerging trends suggest businesses are investing more in interactive media and are offering more ways for customers to interact with their services. A great example of a project we have completed recently is for the TicketDirect kiosk (touch screen device) and extends on the work already carried out on the redesign of their online ticketing experience. The TicketDirect Kiosk is a self-service custom built kiosk solution selling tickets for rugby events in New Zealand.
Information visualisations work as this is how the human brain manages and processes visual information. By creating a graphical representation of data and information, seemingly complicated concepts and information can make more sense in less time. Once we get the basic foundation of user experience design and usability principles correct these visualisation techniques help us to enhance our mental models of information structures and aid in “findability” – a core principle of the customer experience.
Watch this space and expect to see more on data visualisation from Intergen Experience Design in the near future.
Find out how Intergen's User-Centred Design approach can benefit your web application project. Contact Mark Delaney at mark.delaney@intergen.co.nz