Posts Tagged information design
The User Experience of Organic Chemistry – Part 1: A Chemical Language
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on September 23rd, 2010
Who do you think you are, God? ChemDraw is smart enough to warn a user (with a red outline) when something is chemically impossible.
Chemistry is one of the great non-verbal disciplines. In so many ways it reminds me of music. Atoms are too small to see, even with a microscope, so chemists must measure the invisible as spectra and then visualize the data as waveforms – just like audio engineers do with sound in applications like ProTools. To express themselves, chemists draw things in complex symbolic notation – just like a composer draws sheet music. Chemical structure drawings not only represent a molecule’s make-up, but also it’s spatial arrangement, information about it’s chemical properties, and it’s potential intermolecule interactions. From their first days as students, chemists quickly learn to think in two-dimensional planes of geometric shapes such as hexagons and dashed lines, and rarely need to reach for the English words to describe the same concepts (cyclohexane rings and partial bonds, in case you were wondering). By the time one is working as a professional in the field, the visual vernacular is not even questioned. The complex notations are scrawled (by hand) in lab books and on fume hoods, then ultimately plugged into a computer in order to utilize specialized search engines, lab-book software, PowerPoint presentations to colleagues, and to illustrate scientific articles. It is a natural, living language, bending itself over time as new abbreviations and rival ways of doing things are constantly introduced.
The Design of Traffic Control
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on February 3rd, 2010
How do you know if you are well suited to a career in information architecture? Well, here’s a little test. When you are finished reading this post, follow the link I provide to the US Department of Transportation’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices(MUTCD), which is the definitive, 864 page style guide for the country’s road signs, signals, and traffic markings. If you soon find yourself delightfully lost in the visual minutiae and obscene specificity of the guidance provided, then you are either Rain Man or what I suspect is a natural born IA.
Think Like an Instructional Designer: Germane Cognitive Load
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on August 20th, 2009
It’s been understood since the 1950’s that human cognitive processing capacity is severely limited. In fact, you can put a more or less precise number on the amount of discrete pieces of information that a person can manage in their working memory at any given time – the “magic number” of seven. (see Miller, 1956) When asked to repeat a list of random digits or tones (e.g. 5,6,2,10), most people can manage about 5 to 7 of these “chunks” of information when drawing only from their working memory. It is no accident that we can all remember our phone numbers but only the most acquisitive of us can remember our credit card numbers. Of course, it’s a complicated business of how information gets moved in and out of working memory from long term memory (the closest thing nature has to the $4.4 million hard drive, the RamSan-6200). To get into that we’d have to talk about schema theory and the expertise reversal effect and all sorts of other cognitive science concepts… so let’s keep this simple. How can a basic understanding of working memory and cognitive load theory make us into better UI designers?
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