Image, above: Radiation Infographic by byDavvi, CC-licensed

Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is, in part, the message. That, says Jan Swafford, is why ebooks will never completely replace print:

“E-books won’t destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print.”

Some messages, of course, don’t require an emotional investment on the part of the reader.

Health of England - The New York Times iPad infographic -- click to see more images on Flickr

Known for the quality of its ‘infographics’ — visual representations of information that explain events or concepts — the New York Times is experimenting with new ways to present data. An ‘interactive infographic’ accompanied a recent NYT article on the north-south gap in England’s health care:

“The different ‘Health Wheels’ distil 32 different health indicators across 9 geographical regions. The wheels act as visual barometers for the health of each region, in order to provide users with an intuitive way of scanning through all the indicators. A map of England communicates the national perspective in response to the wheel, with a ‘traffic light’ colour code identifying which regions score ‘better than’, ‘worse than’ or ‘average’ compared to the national mean. For the regional view, segments on the wheel are color-coded according to the performance of each indicator.”

You don’t need an iPad to see it — the NYT published a video and Flickr set of photos to show the infographic’s development process and the final product.

Other online publications have also experimented with animated infographics to explain complex concepts.

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The Winged Victory of Samothrace - statue of Nike, now held in the Louvre

Perhaps the Nisroch article caught my eye because I work at an organisation whose:

• corporate logo features Nike, the Greek goddess of victory (and was created long before the sports-shoe company)
• HR/finance enterprise system is called Themis, after the Greek goddess associated with good counsel, proper custom, procedure and social order
• new CRM(ish) enterprise system is named for Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, motherhood, magic and simplicity

Can you see a theme there?

Computer system administrators have a long history of naming their machines, networks and gadgets after gods, pop-culture figures, music composers… anything that comes in groups and provides a mental model, a metaphorical framework that helps people to organise their understanding of the analogue reality it describes.

For example, I know of one organisation that named its mailserver TARDIS and its webserver Metabelis — the webmaster was a Dr Who fan. (TARDIS is the name of the Doctor’s spaceship and Metabelis was an important planet in the Jon Pertwee storylines of the mid-1970s.)

Another enterprise named its webservers for birds — galah, budgie, parrot — and another used the names of Russian composers. If you could remember one name in a series, the theme of the series gave you a mnemonic for recalling the other names.

Another organisation named its array of proxy servers after Snow White’s seven dwarfs. This is a particularly effective example of ‘framing’: hearing the names of two or three machines, you immediately know that there should be seven in total, and with a bit of concentration you would be able to name them all. The reference to a well-known fairytale provides additional information that helps you understand the system’s size and shape.

We often don’t know or recognise the frameworks that affect our behavior and thinking. Frameworks can be a powerful tool for designers, information architects and writers. Understanding an end-user’s mental model of a task or situation can give the designer or IA clues about how to organise and present information. And the organising principle will, as often as not, be based on some kind of underlying cognitive framework.

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Suggested further reading:

• Indi Young’s how-t0 book: Mental Models: aligning design strategy with human behavior
• Donna Maurer’s presentation at Oz-IA (slides and audio) about George Lakoff’s work on categorisation — and how we regularly blur the boundaries between the categories we create
• Wikipedia article about cognitive linguist George Lakoff; his ideas about the relationship between the physical brain and the language of our metaphors are particularly relevant here

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“Enterprise software products are complex, powerful tools. Their complexity is one of the reasons businesses sometimes fail to fully realize the expected return on investment from these products.

“For enterprise employees, who must use these enterprise applications, this complexity poses a considerable challenge. When an organization deploys an application, it expects users to learn the new system, integrate it into their existing work processes, and become proficient enough to allow the organization to realize the system’s full benefits. Far too often, however, enterprise employees find these new systems hard to learn, hard to master, and difficult to integrate into existing processes.”

Enterprise systems are rarely engineered for usability, and this is their downfall: by being cumbersome to use and difficult to customise, enterprise systems will cost your business tends of thousands of dollars in wasted staff time — many, many hours of waiting, backtracking, checking, workarounds and delays, not to mention the helpdesk support.

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The byline says the article was posted 7 minutes ago and updated 8 minutes ago, which is logically absurd.

I saw similar inconsistencies on other ‘breaking news’ articles at the same web site. Articles in the ‘breaking news’ category can be updated several times in a single day, or even within an hour or two of first being published.

The timestamp is added to such stories so that readers know how fresh that breaking news really is. In contrast to a site that’s updated only once or twice a day, you are more likely to trust — and return to — a news web site that seems to be abreast of current events.

A well-built content management system should be able to automatically insert the timestamps and check that they are consistent. It’s worth making certain that your CMS is configured correctly to enable this.

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For interaction designers and information architects, some of the interest is in the design process itself — see Jesse James Garrett’s comments on the Aurora web page about the weekly ‘open design’ sessions that led to creation of the Aurora concept.

For the rest of us, part of the interest is in how much this project looks like an early prototype of the cool stuff Tom Cruise did with the police computer in Minority Report ;-)

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Fortunately, I have some good bones to work with:

The new office is in the Baillieu Library, which marks its 50th anniversary next year, so the retro furniture is quite at home here.

I have a framed print of an Albert Namatjira painting, left behind when the previous owner of my house moved into a nursing home. (Coincidentally, Namatjira died in 1959; there are concerns about copyright in his works expiring and his family being unable to collect royalties.) The style of the plain white frame would go well with the Mitzi chairs and the coffee table. Hmm… I feel a theme coming on…

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