Analytical design and human factors

Analytical Design

The purpose of analytical displays of information is to assist thinking about evidence. Consequently, in designing an analytical graphics, the first question should be: What are the evidence-thinking tasks that this display is supposed to serve?

Analytical grapics should be constructed to serve the fundamental cognitive tasks in reasoning about evidence: describing the data, making comparisons, understanding causality, assessing credibility of data and analysis. Thus the logic of design replicates the logic of analysis; design reasoning emulates evidence reasoning.

Converting principles of thinking into principles of design helps answer the most difficult question of all in the theory of analytical design: Where do principles of analytical design come from? The deep principles of analytical design are derived from cognitive tasks of analytical reasoning. This is appropriate, for the purpose of analytical displays is to assist evidence-thinking.

All this might have something to do with the field of human factors. But in practice, nearly all the great analytical designs have come from those possessed by the content; people who have learned something important and want to tell the world about what they have learned. That is, content-driven and thinking-driven, and not at all driven by bureaucratic externalities of marketing, human factors, commercial art, focus groups, or ISO standards.

In working on 4 books on analytical design, I have often turned to the human factors literature, and then left in despair, finding few examples or ideas (beyond common-sensical) that were useful in my own work. This contrasts to the work of scientists, artists, art historians, and architects–work overflowing with ideas about evidence, seeing, and the craft of making analytical displays.

I believe that work about analytical displays should be self-exemplifying; that is, the work should show us amazing displays of evidence. My despair about human factors began many years ago upon going through volumes and volumes of the journal, Human Factors, where evidence was reported using statistical graphics of wretched quality, with thinner data and worse designs than even in corporate annual reports. Also the methodological quality of the research was poor, and so nothing was credible. The findings seemed entirely context-dependent, univariate (design and seeing are profoundly multivariate), and without scope: what did it matter if some students in freshman psychology in Iowa preferred one clunky font compared to another clunky font in an experiment conducted by a teaching assistant? Later, while consulting, I saw this naive dust-bowl empiricism fail again and again for nearly a decade in trying design a competent PC OS interface. (And with the Mac interface sitting there, smiling, all the time. Apple’s superb interface guidelines seemed to me to be a retrospective account of the beautiful hands-on craft of a few brilliant designers, not a reason to have experimental psychologists attempt to design OS/2 and Windows.)

At any rate, if this was the scientific practice and the design craft of applied psychology, I concluded the field did not have much to contribute to my own work on analytical design.

I happily fled to the classics of science, art, and architecture.

An experiment-based argument for keeping graphical designs a simple and spare as possible:
———
Visual Clutter Causes High-Magnitude
Errors
Stefano Baldassi1, Nicola Megna1, David C. Burr1,2

Ironically, and a bit humorously, there is substantial use of data-imprisoning grids and moire effects in the paper’s data graphics.

Jonathan Ive is Apple’s lead designer for iMac, iPod, iPhone.

From Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC dot.life, “Listening to Mr. iPhone:”

And what emerged were some fascinating insights into the culture of Apple and the craft of industrial design. Ive was insistent that the key to Apple’s success was that it was not driven by money–a claim that may raise eyebrows amongst shareholders and customers–but by a complete focus on delivering just a few desirable and useful products.

“For a large multi-billion dollar company we don’t actually make many different products,” he explained. “We’re so focused, we’re very clear about our goals.”

He said that Steve Jobs had always made it very clear that this focus on products was the only reason for Apple to exist–and contrasted the culture with that of other companies who talk about having similar aims: “If you have to spend time institutionalising that, talking about it, you end up chasing your tail.”

So how did the company decide what customers wanted–surely by using focus groups? “We don’t do focus groups,” he said firmly, explaining that they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

Christopher Frayling reminded us at that point of Henry Ford’s line about what his customers would have demanded if asked–“a faster horse”–and it’s surely true that the point of innovative companies is to come up with products that customers don’t yet know they need.

But it was the physicality of design work that Jonathan Ive was keen to stress–from the Apple design workshop full of machines, throwing off a lot of noise and dust, to visits to Japanese aluminium craftsmen to learn how that material could be crafted into a laptop casing. Yes, of course he and his team use all the latest computer-aided design tools, but he also likes to knock out a physical prototype and feel the weight of it in his hand.

He told a story about how, as a boy, he’d taken apart an old-fashioned alarm clock, and inside the spare outer casing found a mass of workings, “an entire watch factory”.

Extraordinary complexity wrapped in a simple, functional, touchable, beautiful case–that seems to be the Apple design ethic.