If I were a web 2.0 couples therapist, here’s what I’d do:
Record a lot of the couple’s conversations and analyze them with IBM’s Many Eyes data visualization tools. A great way for the couple to see their patterns of communicating. (Hey, I bet my word map would show that I say “Yes, but …” or “I’ll be ready in just a minute…” a million times).
Embed a light-emitting table in the kitchen counter and set it up to give visual feedback on all the hot spots in the couple’s communication. Even I might be embarrassed to keep saying “I’ll be ready in just a minute…” if I could see the frequency with which my kitchen counter started emitting blaring red lights.
A little more complicated than reading “Men are from Mars” (or is it Venus?), but much more effective. And if the relationship fails after that, there is always revenge on YouTube ala Trisha Walsh-Smith.
We deal with increasing amounts of data everyday, and are constantly struggling to make sense of it. Data visualization – the art and science of presenting data visually – can make large amounts of data understandable and memorable if it is done well.
But very few websites take advantage of these methods. This is one area where print media is still ahead of web media – a typical copy of Newsweek will have a visual graphic that is far more sophisticated and compelling than what is found on a typical website.
One reason may be that creating good data visualizations is actually a very hard thing to do – it requires strong quantitative, technical, and visual abilities to produce a result that is both insightful and attractive. And it takes time to create, which is sometimes a bad fit with the fast pace of web creations.
Tag clouds are examples of visualizations that are popular because they convey information that people want. But on many sites tag clouds are annoying or hard to use, with the information looking cramped or jumbled. It’s difficult to figure out how to make tag clouds attractive and effective without taking up most of the webpage space, and most designers haven’t yet achieved it. And tag clouds are such a simple form of data visualization, so it’s easy to understand why the more complex forms of data visualization are still not used widely or well.
Web designers/developers should serve as the cartographers of our digital age – figuring out how to chart and describe the new territory in new ways. But we are not yet using the tools well. As the nature of the web changes – shifting from information stored as a collection of web pages to information stored as data (the “semantic web”) – we will have to get much better at data visualization if we are to make sense of the data onslaught.
