I’ve been in projects where the objective and goal (read: requirement) was very clear.  Crystal clear, in fact.  There’s a market need or problem, a solution has been prescribed, and that project comes to the Product Design table.  My job is to take the solution and think about what it should look like, feel like, and work.  Think: Zune or iPod.  It’s an iterative process, of course, and there’s plenty of back and forth with the developers on what’s actually achievable.

But, frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever been on a project this bad.  Cheers, and happy Friday!

A big part of usability has to do with taking complex data, and presenting it in a visual form that makes sense of as much information as possible as simply as possible.  After all, spreadsheets with their many rows and columns of data are great, but they’re not the most intelligible.  Good information design is one of the problems our team’s constantly trying to tackle.  There’s a whole lot of complex data our clients are trying to pull, having to do with click-thru rates against different segments from major donors to activists to those who are mildly interested, parsed out by geographic location across different swathes of calendar dates.

All of this is just to say that we’re always on the lookout for interesting ways information is graphically visualized and presented.  When the thing being represented is interesting, all the better.  So recently I ran into this graphic of the mysterious world underneath the seas that powers and drives our internet.  Ever wonder how many cables run between Japan and the United States, or which cities are the hubs of our information network?

Smashing Magazine has a treasure trove of modern data visualization, and how can we talk about this topic without referencing the very famous (perhaps, most famous) Charles Joseph Minard’s graphic of Napolean’s March to Moscow?