UsableMarkets

I love my wife, but she has one major flaw: she does not appreciate good information design.

How do I know this? Over the past month or so I have come across what I perceive to be wonderful examples of good information design. For example, this one from the NYTimes:

I wonder at the beauty of the lines, the amount of information encoded into the graphic, the explanatory value of it, and the overall ingenuity.

My wife: Eh, this is useless. Too many lines. I just want to type in my size measurements and see the sizes that relate to me.

Or this example (one of my favorites): weatherspark.com

I spent five minutes pouring over this one (and continue to look at it on an almost daily basis), wondering at the amount of information so nicely laid out, allowing me to see the weather in a way I had never seen it before, allowing me to explore it in a way I had never seen before.

My wife: What is this? I don’t know what I’m looking at? This is for the weather? Just give me a temperature for Christ’s sake.

Ah, the beauty of love.

Setting aside the assertion that maybe I should have married an information designer for total wedded bliss, the point here is that information graphics sometimes need user research and user feedback in the same way that web sites and applications need it. Even if it’s as simple as doing some quick guerilla research to get basic reactions.

~alex