FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

The Challenge

At the core of our jobs as web designers is the need to take complicated data and offer this to users in a way that’s accessible and useful. In our context, this takes the form of information architecture and sensible interaction design principles - but what if the set of data is so rich, so deep, that traditional information architecture fails to cope? How can we make a web of data, not of pages, useful and comprehensible?

Comprehensible, Useful, Beautiful Data

Michal Migurski and the team at Stamen are masters at taking live, deep and vast datasets and making them comprehensible, useful and beautiful. Designer Jeff Veen, formerly of Adaptive Path and Google, now of Small Batch Inc. has devoted recent efforts towards creating a tool called WikiRank; a tool to visualise the constantly changing WikiPedia. Both are trying to solve the problems of extrapolating meaning from seemingly endless amounts of data.

Migurski talked about Stamen’s work, outlining some of the thinking behind Digg Labs’ Stack and his work for CloudMade. Citing traditional cartography as an influence on his work, Migurski talked about how things like online “slippy” maps like Google Maps are becoming incredibly useful tools to think about information and the interface to computers.

A New, Old Problem

In his keynote speech on the last day of Web 2.0 Expo, Jeff Veen covered some similar themes. Veen talked about how, while the amount of data today is extraordinary, the need to visualise data in accessible ways is centuries old.

He used the example of John Snow’s Cholera Map, which Snow used in 1854 to prove to the local council that cholera was being spread at communal water pumps. Even then, appearances mattered - mapping cholera cases in a way that was accessible was crucial in halting the spread of the disease. A cracking example brought to life by Veen, who is a powerful speaker.

These two talks really helped to develop one of the key themes of the week; that the web is no longer a collection of pages, it’s becoming a massive set of data being used and refactored in practically infinite numbers of configurations.