Visuale

I came across this nice book: "Designing Interfaces" the other day.

Even if not explicitly stated in the title, its main content is design patterns for user interfaces, that is, a list of common design problems often encountered by UI designers whose typical solution is captuted by the pattern. Information is organized around a standard template (in the typical pattern language style) containing: what, use when, why, and examples.

The author is Jenifer Tidwell. She has done extensive work on UI design patterns since 1997 starting with her MIT page Common Ground.

Even if it doesn't seem to be directly related to infovis I think it is a great resource to decide how to compose a user interface around a visualization system. In my opinion, too often it's forgotten how important the interface around a visualization is and the key role standard interactive tools play when connected to the visualization.

The pattern language contains also a nice group of patterns entitled: "Showing Complex Data" which doeas exactly for our case. The patterns are:

• Overview Plus Detail
• Row Striping
• Sortable Table
• Jump to Item
• Cascading Lists
• Tree-Table

It's nice to note how visualization and user interface design cross-fertilize each other. Techniques like overview+details have had a big role in visualization but they are more and more used now user interfaces in general. At the same time, many visualization tools are integrating more and more standard UI components like sortable tables and tree-tables as they are very effective and often outperform any other fancy custom-made solution.

I've recently come across this incredibly good book: "Data Mining for Business Intelligence". I was at first a bit skeptical, my academic background naturally led me to wrongly assume a book on applied business intelligence had nothing more to give than the two other respected books I have on the shelf. Wrong wrong wrong!

As I started reading, chapter after chapter, I felt refreshed by a new stream of ideas, like if all those notions I had accumulated year after year could be seen from a new and fruitful perspective. The book is full of applied examples, compact, with a direct and simple language and, above all, made me finally understand what data mining is and what is it for in the real world. It is the first time I feel I can walk in the same pair of shoes of those guy in the trenches who desperately need strong technology to resolve *their* problems.

So, why do I blog this?