Blog
03.16
Live from SXSW Interactive: Down With Ugly Babies
Here I was feeling sorry for Aaron Hursman of Hitachi Consulting. "Boy, I sure wouldn't want to be a presenter on the last day of SXSW Interactive," I thought, making the assumption that Tuesday at the convention center might be akin to August at the box office. Luckily, Hursman turns out to be an Oscar contender.
Right off the bat, he references Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few, a brilliant book that happens to be in the HCK2 library. This is a good sign.
Choosing a panel titled "Effective Dashboard Design: Why Your Baby is Ugly" could have been risky. As Hursman points out, the landscape of dashboard design is paved with horrendous examples of data delivery, and this could have been a session instructing us in how to make cute gauges and pie charts.
I shouldn't have been concerned. Not only have we correctly been reminded that pie charts are always a bad idea—repeat, ALWAYS—Hursman has done a wonderful job of presenting Few's principles and then putting them into the context of his own experience.
Dashboard design is running a parallel race with Web design carrying the torch for standards and good design principles, and in some ways dashboard design is facing a bigger challenge. Dashboard design is certainly a more involving proposition than designing an "About Us" page on a static Web site when you consider the sheer amount of data that has to be communicated at a glance, and even more than in traditional Web design, the torch carriers are surrounded by throngs of evildoers who have a misguided love for "cute," "color," "shapes" and "movement."
The principles of Few are easy to champion and sometimes challenging to implement. I'm pleased to have discovered another crusader here on the last day of SXSW Interactive.
Anonymous
I've known Aaron Hursman for years. He is brilliant! Always has been.
benji.smith
Very cool - it was my first time to see him and his presentation was great. Got me all fired up about dashboard design again (and rekindled the regret about some of the design I've inflicted on people in the past).
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