Egypt is still in turmoil, and after some Czech ammunition was found in Tahrir Square, NISAT searched Eurostat and released some data about EU arms exports to Egypt. NISAT have a map tool that goes only up to 2009 and the data released are from 2011, so I made this visualisation below:
EU Arms Sales to Egypt data visualisation
This matter has got my attention after @asteris tweeting about it.
Posted in Human-Computer Interaction
How much oil, gas, coal is there? What regions are affected by related conflicts? See the infographic below:
Fossil fuel stock visualisation
Data from http://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/2011/09/premiere-challeng/
Posted in Human-Computer Interaction
From June 14 to July 1 at Medialab-Prado, Madrid, Visualizar’11: Understanding Infrastructures offered an international project development workshop and a theoretical seminar where selected papers were presented.
I participated in both the seminar and the workshop; you can see my seminar presentation here. From June 16 to July 1 I participated in the Dromoart project, organised by Arquitectura Expandida and Microgramma. Other participants included Gaston Gontero and Cristina de Miguel.
The project is about mobility of Spanish art ({im|ex}ports to/from Spain). We made a prototype of visualisations during the workshop; reflecting on what we can do next, I made this “infographic” below (collection of visualisations rather than narrative, hence the quotes). Click to view full size:
dromoart Infographic: Click on image for full size
Hope you liked what we did, will keep you posted for any further development. 
Posted in Human-Computer Interaction
I did the following for this competition:
Black students In the UK
I will say a couple of things about the process of making this. What happens is that I’m very busy because I’m presenting at Visualizar’11. So what I wanted to do was to get a quick idea of what’s happening in UK universities wrt demographics, and then visualise it.
That is, this is a visualisation for the busy person who just wants to see the big picture and get a clue of what the story is without drilling into piles of hard data. It seems to work for me, what do you think?
Posted in Human-Computer Interaction
In this post I present five videos from the UIST video archives. I am not involved in any, but I find the videos I chose to be great presentations of UI research work. Here, I focus on the storytelling techniques that make these videos great and not on the quality of the research itself; all research published in UIST is great anyway.
For the non academics, UIST is the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, one of the high-ranked conferences in the field of Human-Computer Interaction.
While compared to non academic videos these might seem slower and less fancy, in a video demonstrating research one has to be very accurate and avoid strong statements. So, apart from sharing these videos because I liked them, I also think that they can serve as a sort of guide, should you have to prepare a demo video for a conference yourself. Enjoy!
Mind you, this is a presentation back from 1995! Despite that fact it uses a visual language to explain its concept. Actually it’s explaining the concept and making a point at the same time. How? The presentation is the interface. That is, in order to explain the Morphic UI, elements of the interface actually move. Yes, it’s that cool.
In summary, the presentation visually supports the story the presenter tells and this leads to an understandable result.
See this video: http://www.acm.org/uist/archive/videos/1995/p21-maloney.mov
This video is about organising photos with pre-used labels, something that we see happening a lot lately in similar ways, this is one way presented in 2004. This video zooms in to present each area of the interface, but only reasonably enough. You will not end up being dizzy after watching it. They zoom out to go back to an overview and zoom in again to present another area of the interface. Given it’s an academic demo, it shows a great use of music. Nothing of acquired taste, makes the video more interesting.
Overall, camera movement and music are used in a way that supports the narrative about the organisation of photos.
See this video: http://www.acm.org/uist/archive/adjunct/2004/videos/demos/d5-girgensohn.mov
Ok, I can’t be objective with the next two papers, since I’m a fan of their work. 
One of the reasons though, is that also the video had grasped my attention when I first saw it (a few years back).
What happens is that the video summarises the problem of information diversity first, and then presents the authors’ work on unifying the structure and appearance of web content. It doesn’t present the solution and state problems it solves in the meanwhile, but has problems and solutions separated. That allows you to focus more on what you’re seeing at the moment rather than reflect on known problems and miss the content. Another thing I liked a lot is that they use really realistic examples.
I can say that the effort put into the video made me appreciate this great work even more.
See this video: http://www.acm.org/uist/archive/videos/2006/p115-dontcheva.mov
I’ll repeat that I’m not objective with this, since I like this work a lot. In this video from 2007 they describe user-guided layouts. That is, end users can design layouts that contain content from various sources. What I like about the presentation is that it embodies a tech demo, a tutorial, and a design process presentation, all in one. While they explain how it works, they also make apparent that their system is targeted to end users and that it is usable by end users.
This video illustrates one way in which one can be visually concise.
See this video: http://www.acm.org/uist/archive/videos/2007/p61-dontcheva.mov
In this video the authors describe an alternative way of visually clustering objects such as icons or lines. They present their work with dummy objects first and then they provide real-world examples. In the end they also demo user research and present its results. Sounds make the presentation more fun.
Building up from abstract examples to the real world and good use of sound makes this presentation understandable and pleasant to watch.
See this video: http://www.acm.org/uist/archive/videos/2007/p173-watanabe.mov
In conclusion, each of the authors avoided extravaganza; I don’t want to imagine how applying all of these techniques in one video would look like. They were very careful to pick techniques that match the nature of their work—or, it could be a result of familirisation with one’s own research. 
What do you think?
Posted in Human-Computer Interaction
What are UI and IxD Design patterns? One definition from UI Design Patterns says:
User Interface Design patterns are recurring solutions that solve common design problems. Design patterns are standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer.
This post includes 1o brilliant resources for UI Design Patterns. There are many posts out there with the same topic, but many have dead links or are just visual showcases.
I think that a collection of screenshots doesn’t serve well communicating design patterns. However, I have included a couple of such resources, because 2 of them have done such a tremendous job, and offer such a great collection of showcases, that the abstraction is visible and the patterns show.
Here’s my top 10, in arbitrary order:
I hope you’ll find them as useful as I did, enjoy!
Posted in Human-Computer Interaction
This post is going to discuss whether users really have a choice on which piece of software they’re using. The initial stimulus was this post about users not reading licence agreements: http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/eula.php
In the beginning, I thought I’d post a comment there. But it would be too big, and slightly off topic. In short, I’m one of the people who always read licence agreements. Always. And I’d urge everyone to do so. To be fair, I pay more attention to the privacy part than to anything else. I have rejected this or that software because of something I read in their licence agreements; examples include Facebook and veoh (I use Twitter and Vimeo instead). I won’t go into details here, because it has to do with my needs and not software being bad or evil per se. My point here is that the user does have choice.
The examples above are web apps, but also desktop software providers almost always provide trial versions. These versions have the same licence agreement with the final product. That is, one has the opportunity to read the licence agreement of a piece of software in the trial version, before buying the full version of the software. Moreover, some licence agreements of desktop software are online, so you won’t even need to download the trial version.
In general, I’m in favour of giving the choice first thing; then your users will be happy.
However, other events also got my attention, like tech in Tunisia and Egypt: http://twitter.com/#!/ekapros/status/30273057469763584
http://twitter.com/#!/tarekshalaby/status/30084055890395136
What happened there is that the people chose to use various technologies–particularly open ones–to disseminate information about what was happening in their countries during protests against their rulers. The rulers tried to filter or cut access to the Internet, the users, though, found a plethora of ways to communicate with the outside world.
Of course, that couldn’t happen with any technology or software: it had to be open enough to allow the dissemination of information. However, since web software is built to allow communication–in contrast with a lot of desktop software–it was the people’s choice to find ways to access this software.
Extreme occasions need extreme measures, and what happened in Tunisia and Egypt (is Iran next?) was an extreme use of tech due to the filtering. Other parts of the world might never have to take such measures, but these show that there is more choice in using software than we usually think there is.
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