Experiencing Information

Here’s an interesting video of Edward Tufte reviewing the iPhone. (Warning: it’s a huge file and takes forever to load fully). He seems to like the iPhone overall, but does have a few valid critique points.

“To clarify, add detail” and “clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design.” Seems the iPhone interface are guilty of both, and they’ve chosen to throw out information rather than fix the design (according to Tufte).

Just got tipped off to Press Display, a news aggregation service from NewspaperDirect. Seems the biggest difference this site offers over competitors is the information experience. They have something called the Press Reader, which displays articles in the context of their original printed formats. You can see the headlines, images, colors, and layout of the original source, among other things. Their tag line: “Redefining the Reading Experience™“. In other words, the information experience is a USP for Press Display.

Here’s how they describe their “Smart Navigation”:

“SmartNavigation in PressDisplay.com provides advanced digital features such as interactive tables of content, full graphics and text views, foreign language translation capabilities, cross-title searching, sharing of articles through email or blog postings, bookmarks, advanced search and monitoring, article and page printing, clickable URL’s, emails and phone numbers and text–to–voice conversion.”

One thing I particularly like is that Press Display allows you to get a good overview of a source, offering a table of contents for entire an newspaper, for instance. You can also browse through all images in a newspaper or through all of the advertisements. (I don’t know of any retrieval system that even makes advertisements available.)

And of course, there are display controls for zooming or showing text in multiple columns and so forth. It’s quite well done. Have a look for yourself–it’s worth it.

(click to enlarge)

What’s more, there are lots of ways to capture the information you find, so it’s not just about an online experience. Download, print, and email options are available. There are also features like RSS and mobile versions of texts.

This all begs the question, Why go to great lengths to retain the look and feel of original publications? Isn’t text just text? Does it matter how the information is presented?

Well, according to people like Andrew Dillon and Misha Vaughan the answer is, Yes–it matters a lot. (See: “It’s the Journey and the Destination“). They’ve investigated what they call information shape, which they describe like this:

“Shape is a property of information that is conveyed both by physical form and information content. Separating these elements completely is perhaps impossible but one can talk of the distinction between the layout and sequencing of information as viewed by the consumer (user or reader) and the cognitive representation of meaning that employs (at least in theoretical terms) knowledge structures such as schemata, mental models and scripts. The representation of meaning is crucial to any analysis of hypermedia design and use as it gives the task real human value, yet it is precisely this component that is frequently by-passed in evaluations rooted directly in physical navigation terms.”

Almost sounds like the folks at Press Display used this notion as a mantra for their design of the interface.

In the age of RSS and atomizing data on the web to point that everything is mash-up-able with everything else, it’s almost ironic that Press Display has emerged at this time. For instance, my view of the blogs I monitor via my RSS reader is extremely homogeneous: everything looks the same. So should we care more about document genre when designing for information experiences?

On one hand, I feel that all too often we strip out all of the qualities of information that native formats offer. These are qualities that give it shape and meaning to us: color, size, position, images, etc. This stuff makes a difference in comprehension.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that I’d use Press Display or find it terribly helpful. Even though they’ve done a pretty good job with the display and interaction, I’m not convinced this service is any better or worse because of the information experience. It’s different, for sure. But the relative advantage in the long term isn’t clear to me, unfortunately. (Of course, I’m not an information professional and my daily work doesn’t center around finding, using, and managing information.)

Maybe there’s a happy medium between text-based information retrieval systems and something like Press Display?

I’m giving two all-day workshops on IA and Navigation here in Hamburg in May. The workshops are being organized and sponsored by Karen Lindemann of Netflow. See the details on Netflow’s site (in German only).

Registration is now open. The workshops will be held in German. Dates: 6.-7. May, 2008.

Gene Smith announced the release of his book on his blog (Atomiq). Unfortunately, it’s about twice as expensive if I buy it here in Germany than on the Amazon.com site. So I’m going to wait until I’m back in the US to get it…probably in May.

Check out Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web by Gene Smith.

Congratulations, Gene.

Daylife, one of my favorite news aggregator sites (probably because it’s one of the best designed news sites), is now offering news widgets. They have some of their own, but also invited anyone to create a share widgets too. The News Index widgets shows change in overall mention for various topics and people from week to week.

We’ve been getting a fair amount of information in the European media about the presidential race in the USA, but I’ve still not been following things as closely as I should. Came across this resource recently that could help out: Presidential Watch 2008 from Linkfluence. Two interesting things here:

First, the use of information visualization is quite good, I believe. The graphs could be drawn a little better, but overall it’s fairly intuitive to use and provides a good amount of control. The main focus is to show trends–mostly at the source level. And it does this good. I like the Trends Monitor, where you can put two candidates head to head on a chart. (I assume this is a Flex application rendered in Flash on the browser.)

Second, the use of analytics to measure influence is interesting. The Watch includes blogs and communities as well as traditional online media, so you get a fairly broad picture. Looks like they are using volume of links to measure influence, which is a good start. To some degree, they may also be analyzing who is saying what and how they are saying it.

What you don’t get is how much the leading sources of information in the presidential campaign change opinions. Just because lots of people link to a certain political blog, for instance, doesn’t indicate whether others are persuaded to change their opinions. That’s hard to measure, but when talking about influence you ultimately need to know that.

Just came across this article from Bill Buxton in Business Week entitled “The Long Nose of Innovation.” He makes some very sober points about the innovation process. The “long nose” refers to what he sees as a mirror image to the long tail where “the bulk of innovation behind the latest “wow” moment (multi-touch on the iPhone, for example) is also low-amplitude and takes place over a long period—but well before the “new” idea has become generally known, much less reached the tipping point..”

He also writes:

“Here’s the message to be heeded: Innovation is not about alchemy. In fact, innovation is not about invention. An idea may well start with an invention, but the bulk of the work and creativity is in that idea’s augmentation and refinement. The newer the idea, the coarser the granularity of most analysis, and the more likely people are to say, “oh, that’s just like X” or “that’s been done before,” without any appreciation for how much work and innovation is involved in taking an idea from concept to wide practice.”

His example is the computer mouse. This invention was born 30 years before it became mainstream. The lesson is to not always focus on the sexy, new idea or invention but to also invest in developing existing technologies and products.