There's no shortage of uses for the loads of data available online. Advertisers always look to mine the photos and status updates that you post on networking sites to better sell their wares. The problem is figuring out really how to organize and put the data in an informative way, instead of forcing users to sift through unending heaps of mind-numbing spreadsheets. When are pie charts and bar graphs enough to break down a set of numbers? Which is the best way to display cellphone call logs or something like senators' voting records?
These were some of the questions debated by researchers, corporate financial analysts and computer science professors at the annual symposium workshops of the Human-Computer Interaction La, University of Maryland. A research manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Mave Houston, stated: "We are trying to understand data and then make sense of it visually. But there is no way of evaluating how effective these visuals really are."
Linking information, devising user-friendly technology devices and coming up with various innovative ways for improving people's interaction with the Web has been part of the Lab's mission since it was founded in 1983 by Ben Shneiderman. Since then, it has been credited with generating hyperlinks - highlighted words in a document, which direct surfers to another site - even down to their peculiar light blue color.
Shneiderman also developed a tool 'treemaps' that display information as blocks of color to indicate hierarchal relationships. "It's satisfying to notice what was once considered esoteric research becoming mainstream computer science, which has revolutionized industries," Shneiderman stated. "Just think, YouTube works simply because designers made it easier to search for videos effectively. Now we’ve high schoolchildren creating videos that register 5 million views."
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