Visuale

I am totally amazed to see these two tools appearing on the web. DabbleDB and Magic/Replace permit to organize you data in a web-based spreadsheet and then process it in multiple ways with few intuitive well designed functions.

I think that everyone who have had a minimal experience with visualizing data knows very well how data (pre-)processing an reformatting is necessary and painful. Sincerely, I cannot recall any single project in which I didn't need some data manipulation.

DabbleDB

DabbleDB lets you organize your data in multiple tables (called categories) and extract views out of it. A view can be a table, an aggregated table or a chart. There are few basic types of charts but they do their job well: neat and clean and super easy to create.

I know, it doesn't look that great so far but when you use it you realize hundreds of little tricks and smart software guesses that makes it wonderful. As an example, it automatically recognizes the column type (date, number, location, etc.) and changes the way data can be aggregated according to the column content. In a date column you can aggregate by day, month, year, etc. In a location column by exact value, region, country, and continent. And aggregation is a matter of few mouse clicks, no hassle, no formulas, no complex "group by" queries. Click on the column and just choose among a series of grouping options.

Another great feature is how data is imported in the system: open it in Excel, copy the table content, past it in a form field, press the submit button and ... puff ... imported. And with very few mistakes as far as I have seen. Again, nothing really revolutionary but it saves lots of time and stress! It can also import data directly form html tables, just paste the url of the page and it imports the data.

Filtering is also very powerful. On the left side you can type a keyword and the view is automatically updated. If you want to do something more sophisticated, you can add a column specific filter and, according to the column type, enable special purpose filtering. In a date field you can type for instance "> 1980" and filter out all the records with a year earlier than 1980.

There are hundreds of other features I did not mention, the best is to try it out and see. It took me very few minutes to register and start to play with it. Alternatively, you can start from this video demonstration, which is very well done.

Magic/Replace

Magic/Replace is a companion product that permits to reformat your data on the fly by cut&paste operations. You cut a piece of data from one field, put it in another field, plus some additional characters, and it updates the full table on the fly. You need to reformat a date? Concatenate Name and Surname in one single field? Create a new column with a piece of data coming from another field? Super easy: just cut and paste the elements and it does the rest for you.

It's a little piece of simple "intelligence" that works really great and it's very useful. The same thing done in Excel or any other product would be a pain. Especially if you are not an expert.

The interface is also very well done. One line tagged "from" and one tagged "to", where you can test your modifications, and a preview button that lets you preview the result in a section of the table. It takes few seconds to understand how it works.

Few Reflections

• Data Management & InfoVis - It's really surprising to see how data management has been neglected in InfoVis, and yet it is so central in our daily activity, both as designers as well as users. I strongly believe the lack of simple data management tools in software products is one of the major barriers to the adoption of InfoVis. Tableau is another great example: data is loaded, managed, and manipulated in few intuitive drag and drop operations. It might be frustrating to accept it but a major quality factor of the systems we design does not reside in the fancy visual representations we make but rather in little details that make a difference like these.
• Data Management & Web 2.0 - These two tools are another example of the power of Web 2.0. I have already argued that we can probably already speak of Vis2.0, a series of visualization tools that work smoothly on the web. Web 2.0 data management tools are another piece added to the puzzle. And it's amazing because, as any other 2.0 tools, it is not only a matter of reproducing the same desktop tool on the web, but also to enable a whole new spectrum of possibilities. DabbleDB, for instance, lets people publish and update the DB on the web in a matter of second, thus enabling collaboration in a way that would be impossible to do with Excel or any other desktop product.

• Simple Intelligence in Software - All the simple tricks and smart guesses found in these two products let me think of the idea of embedded simple pieces of intelligence in software products. It's crazy if you think about it: we have been researching super complex AI algorithms for years, to do things of little use for anybody, and now there are some little intelligent and focused tricks that work really great for some people. It also reminds me of the concept of "Appropriate Intelligence" advocated by Alan Dix: "Designing interactions for appropriate intelligence is based on two principles: 1) it should do good things when it works, 2) it shouldn't do bad things when it doesn't". It is perfectly applied here.
  

I think we will continue to see a proliferation of similar products on the web ... and I cannot be more excited about it! Little by little we have a whole infrastructure that is taking shape on the web and, I am sure, this will help InfoVis and related disciplines thrive in ways we could not even imagine before.