Design (in)considerations

A slideshow of some bad design examples I've been collecting. My favorites are the French translation making you find a 3.17mm drill and the chair that's not a chair..

What will the third dimension bring to data visualization?

I have just started reading Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information. In the first few pages he discusses how we are immersed in a three dimensional world, but our data is stuck on two dimensions, whether on the screen or on paper (3D effects on bars or charts with a third axis do not count..)

The concept of 3D TVs is beginning to take off, with many vendors pushing 3D-ready sets. While glasses-less 3D is a way off, I wonder how this will affect 'standard' data visualizations - I'm not sure that a bar chart with data on a Z-axis that you can actually look around by moving your head, will be much better than the fake 3D ones today that you can rotate around with your mouse.

Perhaps we will start to see 'Sparksurfaces™' instead of 'Sparklines' - move your head to see the data plotted against another variable. I have a suspicion that there won't be any great advances in data visualization, rather we will see even slicker, eye-popping dashboards and charts that may, or may not, be easier to read. Your thoughts?

Spinning electrical sockets as an allegory for software design

While I'm not drawing thirty segment pie-charts in Excel (it's an insider joke), I try to make my house look a little less shabby. To draw inspiration I flick through copies of "This Old House". I came across the the item pictured in a "new stuff" section (a.k.a., filler pulled from press releases) from 2005 . You are meant to replace your receptacles with these new spinning versions:

When I was young, electrical outlets were sedentary, so if you needed to recharge your drill/driver and juice up your iPod at the same time, you had to pull out a power strip or find another wall with a free receptacle.. That's the story you'll be telling your grandchildren one day, after you've retrofitted all the outlets..

I'm sorry, what? This is a clear case of a use-scenario that plainly doesn't exist. 99.999% (I may be under exaggerating)  of people are not going to unwire their existing receptacles to replace them with these that cost at least five times as much. Not. going. to. happen. - they'll (I'll) just pull out an extension strip, and that will be that. If I have bulky transformers to plug in, chances are I'll need more than two outlets anyway. Now the company, which is still in existence surprisingly, does now tout a version that plugs into existing receptacles, giving you four spinny outlets. Nah, I'll still reach for my $3 version that even has two well spaced outlets for transformers.

Now the company may well be making money on the few outlets they sell, and that's great - they'll never dominate the world of receptacles, but if they're paying the mortgage, good luck to them. You can't however make the same assumption when you compare this to a new feature in your software suite. You may have the hots for this new feature, but if the use-scenario just doesn't exist then you're going to confuse your clients, annoy your sales force, and most importantly draw time away from providing what your clients actually need. In a later article I'll talk about use-scenarios, and how to create great ones (Hint: don't ask your customers what they want..)

Safety critical interfaces

While the blog will focus on software, I will occasionally highlight good and bad interfaces elsewhere. Take a look at this picture of my current tester (you hold it near a wire and it beeps and flashes if the wire is live). The end of the tester turns to switch it on. Do you think it's on?

It isn't - it's actually rotated to the orientation where you can pop the cap off and change the batteries. But the cap doesn't pop off - it just sticks in this position until you wiggle it. To switch it on, you have to rotate it the other way, but this way it looks on, so if you weren't paying attention you could test a wire and assume that it's not live.

How should it be designed? Perhaps the cap should pop off as soon as you get it near the stop point - but that would be annoying as I'd be constantly picking up the batteries. Maybe the stop for the remove batteries should be beyond the 'on' setting, so at least you have to turn it past to screw up. Even better, there should be a completely different mechanism for changing the batteries (which you only have to do every few years...)

You'd be foolish to not check it's working by testing it next to a known live wire but people cut corners, work when they're tired, etc. This design is a safety hazard, but neither the manufacturers, insurers, or whoever tested it for its UL listing picked up on this.