Occasional notes on strategy, method, and design themes that recur in our work

Ride a Snail

An organization wants rebuild its critical software infrastructure on new data and software platforms, with rearchitected data structures. The system is large, complex, and critically important to internal and external users. The rebuild will take a year or more but there cannot be a day of downtime. It's what people call a problem of changing horses in midstream. ... (more)

Dashboard

The at-a-glance, birds-eye view of your business or project, and the departure point for action and investigation. Anything requiring your attention should surface here. Two design watchwords are unified and grounded. Unified, because when diverse information can be integrated in a single view, the eye visits fewer focal points to take in project status. Grounded, because ... (more)

Navigation

To navigate complex data effectively it helps to see not only where you are, but where are the promising places to go next. When the data has dimensional structure, it may be possible to provide "sight lines" showing what lies in each direction of possible movement. If you ever use a hue/saturation/brightness color picker, you may have noticed that some ... (more)

Real Time

Major payoffs can sometimes be gained by adding real-time "liveness" to content that has been conventionally understood in a static or sequential way—payoffs like interface transparency, high information bandwidth, effortless feedback, and harnessing users' ability to act and learn through physical manipulation. (more)

Representation

How users understand a representation can be influenced by subtle cues that trigger different intuitions. A time graph of breath flow, used as part of an innovative health game, provides a good example. (more)