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Data Visualization and Infographics - Smashing Magazine

Data Visualization and Infographics - Smashing Magazine
Advertisement The main goal of data visualization is its ability to visualize data, communicating information clearly and effectivelty. It doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful. In both print and web design infographics — visual representations of information, data or knowledge — are often used to support information, strengthen it and present it within a provoking and sensitive context, depending on designer’s creativity. This article presents some spectacular data visualizations and infographics which manage to combine a strong visual appeal with the effective presentation of information. You might want to take a look at the article Data Visualization: Modern Approaches1 we’ve written few months ago. Data Visualization and Infographics Flags as Infographics3These posters have been designed for the political magazine Grande “Reportagem”. Independent: Infographic4Middle-East: who backs immediate cease-fire?

Junk Charts How to Design Content Filters for Better User Browsing by anthony on 10/24/11 at 9:51 pm Where does one start when they visit a website and want to find content that interests them? They could start from the beginning and browse through all the content until they find something they like. A content filter classifies content and displays them in unique ways. Believe it or not, there are only five dimensions to classifying content. Location Location is a dimension you can use if you have content that comes from several different sources. iTunes Movie Trailers gives users the ability to browse movies by the different movie studios they come from. Alphabet Classifying content by alphabet is another dimension that most sites can use. Time Time is a popular dimension to use for content filters because time is a dimension that all content shares. Category Category is another popular dimension for filtering content. Hierarchy The hierarchy dimension is one that offers a lot of possibilities.

FlowingData UX Booth: User Experience & Usability Blog User Interface Engineering - Usability Research, Training, and Events - UIE Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices Advertisement Structure and hierarchy reduce complexity and improve readability. The more organized your articles or web-sites are, the easier it is for users to follow your arguments and get the message you are trying to deliver. In body copy headlines and enumerations are usually used to present the information as logically separated data chunks. Search engines almost always use pagination; newspapers tend to make use of it for navigation through the parts of rather large articles. In most cases pagination is better than traditional “previous – next” navigation as it offers visitors a more quick and convenient navigation through the site. Let’s take a look at the good practices of pagination design as well as some examples of when and how the pagination is usually implemented. Good Practices Of Pagination Design(7 Aspects according to Faruk Ates) Related References Mistake #1: Navigation Options Are Invisible But most importantly, the navigation options should be visible. Gallery

The Secret to Designing an Intuitive UX Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPad, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPad, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPad will be like. You have assumptions about what the book will look like on the screen, what things you will be able to do, and how you will do them—things like turning a page, or using a bookmark. You have a “mental model” of reading a book on the iPad, even if you’ve never done it before. What that mental model in your head looks and acts like depends on a lot of things If you’ve used an iPad before, your mental model of reading a book on an iPad will be different than that of someone who has never used one, or doesn’t even know what iPads are. Mental models have been around for a long time I’ve been talking about mental models (and their counterparts, conceptual models, which we’ll get to shortly) since the 1980s. Just how long? So what is a mental model, then?

Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn't) Use Them - Articles Drop-down lists are great – when used correctly. If there’s anywhere between 7 and 15 options, a drop-down list is usually a really good fit. You can put a healthy amount of information in your form without cluttering the entire page, because the list’s options are hidden when you don’t need them. However, many sites are using drop-down lists with too many options (more than 15) or too few (less than 7), resulting in a poor user experience. Drop-down lists with too many options When drop-down lists grow larger than 15 options they become difficult to scan and navigate. A good example of this is a country-selector with more than 100 options! Like most e-commerce stores, Amazon force you to select your country from a massive drop-down list. As a user, you first have to figure out the sorting pattern – are the options listed alphabetically, or by some other logic? Drop-down lists with too few options On Yahoo! Share your thoughts in a comment.

Don’t Put Hints Inside Text Boxes in Web Forms By Caroline Jarrett Published: March 21, 2010 This is my first Good Questions column for UXmatters. In this column, I’ll be writing about questions. When communicating with users in one direction, we typically ask them questions—often through forms or surveys. When communication goes in the other direction, we try to respond to users’ questions—both through the design of our Web applications and other products and, sometimes, in assemblies of what we hope will be their Frequently Asked Questions. “Hint text is rarely effective as a way of helping users, but instead becomes a default input.” In January 2010, Janet Six’s column, Ask Matters, “Label Alignment in Long Forms,” included extensive discussion of one of the most frequently asked questions about forms design: where to put labels in relation to their fields. Don’t worry. The short version of my advice: Don’t do it! Read on, and I’ll explain. An Example of a Hint Inside a Text Box Where Did the Idea of Hint Text Come From? Reference

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