Complex UI - There’s a Time and a Place
Linkedin maps data visualization (Photo credit: luc legay)
I am currently working on a advertising and marketing reporting interface that is mostly grid driven and we are adding some data visualization to it because quite frankly the thought is that most users just don’t have that ‘ah-ha’ moment when data is presented to them in a grid. Even if they are somewhat simple stats grids can be daunting to look at. That said, a well paginated grid (or better yet infinitely scrolling grid) can be the most powerful tool.
To decide whether to go more complex on a grid or to pop out data visualization you need to consider time spent on that particular part of the application. You also need to decide whether the visualization of the data is just to show off and be fancy or if it really has a use.
For example when presented with a grid of data from an online advertising campaign, it’s easy to go through and see how much money you spent on a particular campaign for…say 30 days or even 90 days but once you get above about 100 rows you really need a trend chart to see where the spikes and troughs in spend are.
Another good use of a data visualization are nested trees or what the javascript d3 library calls a Dendogram. To zero in on, or drill down into data expandable rows in a grid are useful but if you want to come over many layers of nested data to see what is really driving value, a visualization is probably a better choice. That said, as a rule of thumb, I would always present the grid option so you can see precision in numbers once you have identified your ‘significant’ data points.
- Data Visualization Resources (secviz.org)
- Visual Data Tools, Inc. Announces the Mac App Store Release of DataGraph, an Innovative and Powerful Graphing Application for Mac OSX (prweb.com)
- Data Visualization - Is it Important? (mobtownlabs.com)
- Cascades: Rich UI Development for BlackBerry Apps (devblog.blackberry.com)
