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The Birds Nest & the television experience

by Doug LeMoine

Amazement operated on many levels during the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. During each performance, my mind struggled to process what I was seeing. What is this? How in the world did they pull this off? Where does an idea like this even come from? TV: These small... (Continue)

Slanty (and underhanded) Design

by Chris Noessel

I’ve been entranced with the notion of Slanty Design ever since I read Russell Beale’s article about it in Communications of the ACM in 2007. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Slanty Design is kind of anti-affordance, a difficulty-of-use employed to achieve certain design decisions. I think... (Continue)

Countdown to a spanking

by Daniel Kuo

XP: Are you SURE you don't want to restart now? A constant thorn in my side from our use of Windows XP as our primary workstations is the Automatic Updates feature. In explaining my frustration to others, I've inevitably compared it to very similar behavior in Mac OS X,... (Continue)

Seeing patterns in research findings

We’re always on the lookout for engaging ways to communicate the patterns we uncover in our research. What factors cluster into significant groups? What are relevant attributes and relationships? What trends do we see?

Shan Carter and Amanda Cox at the New York Times recently produced a fantastic interactive chart highlighting the voting patterns along several demographic factors in the Democratic primaries. (You can read more about this graphic from Shan Carter here.)

I love the idea of starting with this approach and overlaying additional factors to draw out relationships and relative importance. In the Times example, imagine the squares drawn in relative proportion to the number of delegates in play; color and saturation representing the percentage of Democratic votes in the 2004 presidential election. Combining multiple factors does complicate the visual, so care must be taken to preserve the clarity that makes it so effective.

At Cooper, we often do something similar, with behavioral variables of interview subjects plotted along major axes, combined with demographics like age, organization type and role, to paint a picture of the interrelated web that helps us make meaning of a diverse human population. We always try to walk through these visualizations with a story that ascribes meaning to the observations, but providing clients (and ourselves) with an opportunity to interact with the data in a well-curated way really emphasizes the relevant factors and helps everyone understand the patterns we use to drive decisions and take action.

Filed under: Communicating design, Information design, Research

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