Good & Bad Visualizations
Our assignment this week was to collect a good and a bad example of information visualization. Since I've been doing a lot of shopping lately for our new apartment, I chose my examples from ecommerce sites. Not normally my first choice for creative ideas, but they do face a distinct and relevant challenge of presenting large databases of information to users--ideally in an intuitive and appealing way.
The Good
On the positive side, I am impressed by the beta Browse Goods website, a heavily visual and immediately intuitive interface. The zoom and drag metaphor is well suited to any primarily aesthetic collection, and would probably work equally well for art collections such as the Museum of Art & Design collection we'll be focusing on next. The interface manages to promote a sense of fun and discovery as you easily home in on your area of interest--an experience any ecommerce site would surely strive for. The site's organizational merits are further enhanced by the contextually-sized visual chunking of information, unobtrusive secondary breadcrumb navigation, strategic and restrained use of text, and a simple and well-integrated search mechanism.
The site falls a bit short in several areas, mostly tangential to information visualization, but still worth noting. The first is that although the interface is exceeding simple to interact with, it does take about 8-10 clicks to get to the finest level of granularity (in this case, the details/purchase page). Most web designers would consider this too many steps to gratification (though it does not bother me in this case). Secondly, I strongly suspect that this site would be very difficult, if not impossible for people with mobility and vision disabilities to use. And thirdly, because I just moved and my DSL is not yet hooked up, I had the frustrating experience of trying to use the site on dial-up, which was unbearably slow. Keeping in mind the large number of people in the US and beyond who still use dial-up, this is a significant limitation in terms of usability.
The Bad & The Ugly
On the flip side, I find the Pier1 website to be offensively badly designed. My negative reaction is, again, heightened by the fact that I'm viewing it on tortuously slow dial-up, but I think my complaints hold true even with a fast connection. First and foremost, the designers made the fatal mistake of directly transferring a physical interface (magazine) to the web. Egregiously, the online interface is not searchable, and has no table of contents or categorizations to help the user parse the information and locate an item. The only metaphors for browsing are the physical "page turn" bluntly imposed onto the screen, and the useless page number-based scroll bar. Users would accept these limitations in a print interface (though I'd still expect and prefer a table of contents), but in a web interface, they are completely unacceptable.
Also, whereas the Browse Goods site's zoom function is intuitively integrated as a means of visually and metaphorically homing in on information of interest, the Pier1 site requires the user to spot an item they are interested in, then zoom in on the marginal text descriptions and read through them all to locate the one that relates to their item--there arn't any corresponding codes or labels to assist in this process, and when zoomed in on the text, you can no longer view the item that interests you to compare text to picture. Then, to cap it all off (though this doesn't relate to visualization) you can't even purchase items through the site after all your arduous searching; you have to go to a store and repeat the search process in person to get your hands on anything. This site is so poorly designed and difficult to use, it actually makes me mad.
Contrasting the positive and negative feelings I experienced with each of these visualizations highlights for me the impact good design can have, whether representing something as trite as consumer goods, or as important as politics, social justice, etc.