[Sigia-l] Information Visualization

[Listera]

"Karl Fast" wrote:

> Rao believes that the adoption of visualization principles in
> interfaces is inevitable. People on this light might not agree, but
> Rao is the CTO of Inxight, so you'll be hard-pressed to convice him
> otherwise (and he's spent a lot of time thinking about the problem).

I think he's the one selling the notion, so he'll have to do the convincing.
:-) 
 
There are some fundamental issues with information visualization (IV), some
of which may not be efficiently solvable in practice.

Take video streaming/webcasting, heavily hyped as capable of changing how we
consume video/TV. Lots of technical issues have been either solved or are on
the trajectory of being solved over the last decade: storage, CPU, servers,
encryption, DRM, etc. Unfortunately the issue of scalability hasn't been and
may never be solved given our architecture. Unlike TV, adding viewers to a
webcast raises costs considerably, while with TV it's pure profit. Yes
there's multicasting, CDNs, etc., but scalability remains a
fundamental/unsolvable problem.

Likewise, IV has a few technical barriers, chief among them is scalability.
Looking at static IV samples is no fun. The real benefit is in IV
interactivity, the ability to give the user instant feedback. Unfortunately,
IV feedback on large data sets is impossible now and will remain so in the
near future. I've written on this here before, but bandwidth, database
access and app server latency are insurmountable barriers when serving IV in
large numbers, with no solution in sight.

Having said that, I'm actually interested in non-technical barriers to IV.
Do users prefer IV over other procedural methods? Do they understand them?
Would they bear the cost of learning how to access IV? Are there perceptual,
spatial and cognitive problems with IV for Joe Average? Is the value in IV
greater the cost of delivering it? Etc.

----
Ziya

Consumers can't feel the effects of innovations that don't occur.