Data Mynah

Hans Rosling - The Joy of Stats →

one of the best video’s i’ve seen, even from Hans…

Online resources for subject: Information & Libraries →

Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design →

an oldie from Jakob Nielsen, but still relevant in oh so many cases…

Summary:
The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be.

Since my first attempt in 1996, I have compiled many top-10 lists of the biggest mistakes in Web design. See links to all these lists at the bottom of this article. This article presents the highlights: the very worst mistakes of Web design. (Updated 2007.)

1. Bad Search…

2. PDF Files for Online Reading…

3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links…

4. Non-Scannable Text…

5. Fixed Font Size…

6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility…

7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement…

8. Violating Design Conventions…

9. Opening New Browser Windows…

10. Not Answering Users’ Questions…

Other Top-10 Lists

• High-Profit Redesign Priorities
• Usability in the Movies — Top 10 Bloopers
• Most violated homepage guidelines
• Top homepage usability guidelines
• Good deeds in Web design
• Web design mistakes (2005)
• Web design mistakes (2003)
• Web design mistakes (2002)
  With cartoons.
• Web design mistakes (1999)
• Web design mistakes (1996)
  My first list. Luckily, many of these mistakes have been fixed by now.
• Application design mistakes
• Information Architecture (IA) mistakes

invisible cities →

A project by Christian Marc Schmidt & Liangjie Xia.
By revealing the social networks present within the urban environment, Invisible Cities describes a new kind of city—a city of the mind. It displays geocoded activity from online services such as Twitter and Flickr, both in real-time and in aggregate. Real-time activity is represented as individual nodes that appear whenever a message or image is posted. Aggregate activity is reflected in the underlying terrain: over time, the landscape warps as data is accrued, creating hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data.
In the piece, nodes are connected by narrative threads, based on themes emerging from the overlaid information. These pathways create dense meta-networks of meaning, blanketing the terrain and connecting disparate areas of the city. Invisible Cities maps information from one realm—online social networks—to another: an immersive, three-dimensional space. In doing so, the piece creates a parallel experience to the physical urban environment. The interplay between the aggregate and the real-time recreates the kind of dynamics present within the physical world, where the city is both a vessel for and a product of human activity. It is ultimately a parallel city of intersections, discovery, and memory, and a medium for re-experiencing the physical environment.

Information Representation - Academic Papers →

a collection of interesting articles shared among the Mendeley ‘Information Representation’ group

The Flamenco Search Interface Project →

The Flamenco search interface framework has the primary design goal of allowing users to move through large information spaces in a flexible manner without feeling lost. A key property of the interface is the explicit exposure of category metadata, to guide the user toward possible choices, and to organize the results of keyword searches. The interface uses hierarchical faceted metadata in a manner that allows users to both refine and expand the current query, while maintaining a consistent representation of the collection’s structure. This use of metadata is integrated with free-text search, allowing the user to follow links, then add search terms, then follow more links, without interrupting the interaction flow.

…

Flamenco goes open source!

What Makes a Good Infographic? →

It can sometimes be difficult to explain what makes a piece of art “good”, but as a famous judge once said, “I know it when I see it.” To that end, allow me to shed some light on what makes a good infographic. It seems that with each passing year, infographics are getting more traction on sites like Digg, and more and more people are looking to master the craft of marrying information with graphic design. Here are some things to keep in mind when designing your next piece…