Visualizations, Innovations Overview

Well, here goes. Here is a quick view at the innovations both visual and interactive that have come out of my shops since 1997. I haven't included anything since 2007, but will be making some screenshots for those in the upcoming months. In the last two months there were a lot of very quiet projects with a substantial amount of thinking. Take the rethink of Western Union's transaction engine for one.

Enjoy.


Left, this was my plan for creating a design structure for Internet Travel Network (ITN 1997). To the right, a quick visual shorthand for a user's travel history. It shows departure and arrival airports, travel days, and additional elements like rental cars.


Left, another design for ITN showing a great product that showed realtime flight location at a detail that would have made Homeland Security uncomfortable. To the right, the winning entry in Stewart Butterfield's 5K contest. My team at Cornell created an entire, working ecommerce site in less than 5k.


Left, early design for Cornell University front page. Right, an early look at Cornell's revolutionary universal search. Both 2004.


Left, another beautiful take on the Cornell front page concept. Right, a mockup for Gimme! Coffee's one pound bags showing origin, full taste profile, name, and roast.


Left, final Gimme! Coffee label. Very close to what they use today. Right, the 2003 redesign for Gimme! Coffee's home page.


Left, SiliconGorge concept for Gimme! Coffee's purchasing list. Right, evolution of design based on Learn/Buy dichotomy.


Two concept documents for a Fortune 500 customer service Web application. Left, data mapping for feature possibilities. Right, pre-historic use case clumping.


This shows the next step beyond use case clumping. Left, organizing the client's feature needs into silos. Right, further evolution of customer silo as we rapidly developed working models.


Two ways for the CSR to check the health of the customer account. Left, a view of all relevant activity, changes, requests, and CSR comments at the rep's fingertips. Right, a view of CSR comment types.


Left, the final prototype for managing a user's mortgage payment schedule, featuring a 12 month schedule. Right, zoom into a monthly view.


Left, the projected transaction schedule for all user payments. Right, a special comment type generated by the system warning CSR of integrity problems with the account.


Evolving the payments persona presentation. We mocked up Edward's persona on a cork board before creating his 5 companions. Left, the persona wall. Right, the cork workspace.


Left, a final proof of the persona concept tool. Right, another persona tool: a research report for a small business payments product.


Left, paper prototyping for Desktop payments application, the most trusted electronic payments space for the user. Right, concept model for debit card-to-payments card interaction.


Two grids used for developing our 360 concepts. Left, showing appropriateness of venue or method to payment type. Right, matching location and method access.


An example of our work in defining Control for electronic payments.

Pantheon

While taking the Bruce Clay SEO Toolset training last month it hit me that I have built myself a Web Pantheon for people--from the past whom I've either met or have seen lecturing--who have had a significant impact on my concept of the Internet and its function.

Jakob Nielsen (1997)
I attended an early N+N usability conference in SF that included Bruce Tognazzini. JN's imperative to make usability an integral part of Web design struck a chord with me, but the conference left me cold. I would continue to watch UseIt.com, but would no longer have much patience for "Jakob's first rule of anything". Too bad, because there is a lot of good information there, it's just painted with stink.

Edward Tufte (1997)
That same year, I went to see Tufte speak in SF. I had been a fan of his work since I did time in a Berkeley design bookstore called Builders Booksource. What Tufte tells us is something that we can apply to the Web. Tufte knows relatively little about the Internet--and that's okay. His clarity regarding graphical information and communication is universal. (See the fantastic book called Envisioning Information)

Dan and Al Whaley (1997-8)
Dan and Al were the founders of Internet Travel Network. ITN was my first true dynamic Internet experience and the first time I cracked $50K. At ITN we worked with their proprietary scripting language called QuarterMaster--it didn't work very well with JS, but it had an elite force of programmers supporting it. Something like Force 10 From Navarone. This father and son team had worked through the original Waiters on Wheels site, using a template/db-based approach in the earlier 1990s. ITN became the first company to put travel reservations on the Web. Two smart, but regular, people doing something that had never been done before. Working there set the foundation for my understanding of dynamically created sites. Jeez, we sure made enough of them.

Brewster Kahle (1998)
I think I saw BK at a CNET conference in SF. If not, it was in New Orleans in a similar timeframe. Kahle was the first one to get it into my head that we have an upcoming crisis in keeping track of what he called "our digital heritage". Moving on, as I did, to Cornell University, the situation became clearer when I interacted with people associated with the National Digital Science Library (NSDL) and the Cornell Library. We have been able to count on paper as a high fidelity record of our past communication, but now it is being deleted like Henry Miller novels in a Nazi book burning. At that point, Kahle was making recordings of the entire Internet regularly on something that would fit on a couple of 500USD hard drives.

Paul Ginsparg (in abstentia, 2003)
Although I didn't meet Paul at Cornell when I was Director of Web Communications, his arXiv.org has rippled through my life. So close enough. Paul was a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient for 2002. His idea was relatively simple. Make research more accessible by publishing it online and without peer-review (although arXiv.org is moderated). In this case, peer-reviewed journals had a strangle hold on the content coming out of science research. arXiv.org blew the lid off and started publishing nearly everything that came its way. It became a "precipitating factor that lead to...the open access movement." Of course I would like to see OA go as far as possible into the world of publishing. I see copyright's flaws as one of the primary inhibitors to growing human knowledge.

Bruce Clay (2008)
As I said in the beginning of this post, I had this realization in a Bruce Clay training session. I wrote Nielsen, Tufte, Kahle, Clay. And then I started to think about Mr. Clay. Here is someone clearly very smart, systematic, etc. He is approaching the Google algorithm scientifically. There was a primary idea that I got from him, that had the typical "re-shaping" effect all of these pantheon members have had on me. It is this: Google is navigation. It is more important than your nav bar. People don't start at your site, they search for it. When they search, they want to go to the precise page that will address their needs. Of course, if they don't find it, it's possible to reposition them within your site, but more than likely they are going to back out. Optimizing the site for search is more important than making the site useful to one who has been dropped from the sky.

So, that shifted my thinking, but then I couldn't help pity Clay for the time he must spend on divining the Algorithm. It's not that he's trying to find the cure for cancer or Alzheimer's. He is trying to find out something that someone already knows. It's not science at all, it's Cryptology. He's trying to break the code (in the nicest way he can to preserve the relationship with Google, of course). If the algorithm were open he could focus his methods elsewhere.

Technorati Profile