14 Mar Designing for Decision-making—not the same as workflow

One of the challenges of the visualization business is that ‘visualization’ means different things to different people. And naturally, people go with what they know. One of the related areas—and one more in the comfort zone of a lot of buyers—is user interface (UI) design. Good web designers should be able to create meaningful visualizations, right?

Well, not exactly. Visualization actually requires a whole different set of skills than UI and web design. Fundamentally, visualization is about decision-making—understanding the information and its context better so that you can ask better questions, get better answers, and make better choices. UI design is workflow—like a data entry form, a website shopping cart, or trying to figure out how to reset the bullet formatting in Powerpoint.

Both have an important element of navigation, which may be why the two seem interchangeable. But one is navigation based upon the way the data is interpreted via the visualization (you can’t say where you are going but you’ll know it when you get there). The other is navigation to accomplish a task—fairly straight-forward to map with predictable parameters.

And visualization is data-driven. This, it turns out, also demands a different approach and skills than UI design. That’s because UI designers are used to being able to control the way something looks, but visualization renders based on the data driving it. It’s hard to get away from the legacy of the graphic design thinking that has dominated screen-based design—but a fundamentally print-based approach demands control over almost every pixel and the way any page or view will render. Visualization is not about designing information graphically, it’s really about designing graphical systems that will render unknown and unpredictable data into consistent, intuitive, visual metaphors.