Tufte's visualisation
We had an interesting visualisation and representation problem last week for Sleevenotez. Our next Iteration involves adding a lot of richness to the interface, which includes the presentation of quite a lot of complex data. However, we don’t want to make the interface very complex - we’d like to keep the simple stripped-down look and feel we have now.
We got properly stuck with the discography, and I turned to my books by Tufte for some inspiration. The problem is, as Jon Udell notes here: Scaling the Tufte effect, that Tufte’s brain doesn’t scale very well. He only has one, and it’s his.
Inspiration was unfortunately scarce, and we ended up spending many more hours thrashing about the problem. Jon Udell’s call there for a Tuftian visualisation library for the web is a very relevant and timely request, hwoever it is not without some significant hurdles.
Unlike a traditional charting library, I think part of the core of Tufte’s technique is his advocacy of thinking of the users of the data, and concentrating on usability. A lot of the terminology he uses is reminiscent of the patterns movement in fact, and I wonder if there is a potential angle of attack there, using some of the techniques that have emerged from the patterns movement to analyse how and when to use certain techniques.
Of course even better would be factoring this into a library. As others have noted (for example this excellent post at lesscode or even some of the notes in the Wikipedia page, it should be possible to factor a pattern properly into code - it’s just hard.
If we really could factor Tufte in this way, maybe he really would scale!