Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Reaction : Effectively Communicating Numbers

The white paper is an attempt to throw some light on the aspects which most of us do not otherwise invest time in. Most often there are templates available and it is only the data that we are interested in, representation if often not the main priority.
The paper starts with the most common example of how we are inclined toward making jazzy presentation of UI and often fail in conveying the rather important message.

The paper gives the comparison between Graph and Tabular representation of the data.Both have their own strengths and a fair amount of hints are thrown , as to when to choose what or both to represent the data.

One of the sections that i liked was how not to distract the user , may it be with the colors or background. It is important to have the user see what is important and not be lost into other distracting elements.

There is a lot of information thrown with nuances and sometimes it is difficult to understand when to choose and map the given suggestions. However the step by step graph design and selection summarizes the entire paper really well.

Reaction : The value of Information Visualization

The paper mainly discusses about information visualization and the perspective and challenges as seen by the author. The main problem that visualization is sidlined and not given focus , is simply because the task beyond that are considered and in fact are usually more perceived to be important. For example he gives a nice example of a nice visualization of the biological finding which could not have been easily explained without the visualization but most of the focus is actually on the experiments that were conducted for months and the results that were derived. The paper tries to showcase the value of Info-vis and touches various sections including statistics.

It is mostly an attempt to create awareness and importance of Info-vis and to some extent it does serve the purpose.

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