the onda

To fulfill what seems to be a minimum quota of Twitter pieces (and proving once again that the Nytimes prefers to lead from the rear by picking up on timely web events a month after they happen), Miguel Helft has a piece on Doug Bowman's very public break with Google and subsequent escape to Twitter, a fairer place not dominated by the drudgery of data-driven interface design.

While it seemed like a fun argument to have (data versus art and instinct), it's overly simplistic as any great interface designer will use a full spectrum of tools to push the man-machine interface in creative and interesting new ways.

Interestingly enough, it has been a recently renewed interest in gaming (reignited by the iPhone and games like Rolando and Doodle Jump) that has gotten me thinking about interfaces again. Most of us have spent far too long locked in the relatively limited box model of the standards-based web for information display, and it's good every once in a while to pause and reconsider what that and the relatively crude forms-based way of interacting with the computer via a thin HTTP-powered straw have done to hold us back.

If you feel that way as well, I'd highly recommend reading Bret Victor's "Magic Ink," a long essay on the challenges in software interface design. Victor works at Apple which should give him some street cred in most people's eyes, but more significantly, he comes to the problem of interface design as a systems engineer turned design aficionado. As a result he does more to advance the thinking on interaction and interface design in the 75 pages of his essay than all of the hoopla over whether A/B tests are good for making decisions on interface elements.

Essentially, Victor calls for an end to thinking of the problem from the perspective of interactivity first and foremost, drawing a distinction between "manipulative" software, that the user uses to make something, and "information" software which is is mostly employed by users to acquire knowledge. He argues that most of the software out there today falls into this latter camp and that as a result we should invest more time, energy, and tooling into building what he calls "context-sensitive information graphics" which you can think of as Tufte on steroids— or at the very least, infoporn that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of computer displays. As he writes:

I suggest that the design of information software should be approached initially and primarily as a graphic design project. The foremost concern should be appearance—what and how information is presented. The designer should ask: What is relevant information? What questions will the viewer ask? What situations will she want to compare? What decision is she trying to make? How can the data be presented most effectively? How can the visual vocabulary and techniques of graphic design be employed to direct the user’s eyes to the solution? The designer must start by considering what the software looks like, because the user is using it to learn, and she learns by looking at it.

It's a great piece with a wealth of footnotes embedded throughout. More importantly, as computer companies everywhere race to build their visions of a "fourth computing screen" a.k.a., a tablet (the first 3 being the PC, the TV, and the smartphone), we ought to all stop to consider the ways in which we might better be able to move towards Victor's proposed information software design discipline.