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Workshop Reminder: 3 Days Until New York

There are only 3 days left until the New York Visual Thinking Workshop.  There are still a few seats available and there’s still time to register.  Come join Karl Gude & Dave Gray for a fun, engaging day as we learn how visual thinking can be used to explore complex information and present it more effectively. This workshop combines high-level design principles with practical applications through a series of hands-on exercises, designed to develop analytical, design and visual thinking abilities.  Working individually and in small teams, you will learn and practice visualization techniques that have been successfully used to improve innovation and accelerate change at some of the world’s leading companies.

After completing this workshop you will have a toolkit for thinking and presentation effectiveness — your presentations of complex information and strategies will never be the same.

Date: May 2, 2008
Time: 8am-5pm
Location: Crowne Plaza – White Plains, New York

Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski

It’s time for another book review.  Releasing later this week is Luke Wroblewski’s latest book, Web Form Design.  Not surprisingly, the book is about how to design good forms for websites.  Luke is an author, the Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc, and was a facilitatorat our recent VizThink event in San Francisco.

I wish I could say that a book like this wasn’t necessary because every website used good design principles when creating their sites, but, having filled out too many web forms, the concepts are something that anyone gathering information from website visitors should read and implement.  While building on earlier efforts by the likes of Jakob Nielsen, Alan Cooper, and Don Norman, Luke takes a different approach in some ways more broad talking about overall design principles and in some ways more narrow focusing only on forms.  While books of this sort could easily devolve into programming lessons, Luke keeps his focus on his mission of good design. 

At first, you may wonder why a web form design book fits in the visual thinker’s library.  The User Experience/Interface Design/Usability community has much in common with visual thinking, and are, in fact, a vital part of the community.  Just like other groups, they work with complex information and try to present it in such a way that reduces the time needed to process the information and increases comprehension.

In the first two chapters of the book, Luke focuses on why form design matters and the overall organization of forms.  He also presents the case for form design as a conversation between the company and the customer including the benefits and disadvantages of using a conversational tone.  In the next 6 chapters, he dives into the details of particular form elements with advice on how and when to use them.  Throughout these chapters, Luke focuses on the impact of element selection on flow.  Each of the ideas are supported with usability testing including some very interesting eye tracking technologies used by Etreand Matteo Penzo.  He does a particularly nice job of talking about the use of passwords and password fields in a registration form, but then I think he brushes over the creation of a “password so secure they can’t remember it”.  Maybe it’s one of my pet peeves, but if the website has thought enough to design a form with the instructions to create a “secure” password that has “one uppercase letter, two symbols, and three numerals”, they should also be kind enough to put those same instructions on the login screen.

The book really gets interesting in the final 6 chapters where he covers the more complex issues of interactivity, help, validation, and even a nice section on what’s next with forms.  Advice on smart defaults (using the responses from the majority of your audience as a default), personal defaults (using the previous responses from a person to inform defaults), inline validation (checking responses as they are typed), and maybe most interestingly his concept of gradual engagement.  Why have people fill out forms at all?  In fact, forms deter the involvement of many people.  One of his examples is a travel documentation service called TripIt.  Rather than asking the visitor to provide lots of information about themselves up front, the service gets the person going right away and then gathers pieces of the information over time as they are needed.  Form design by eliminating forms, now that’s innovation!

Overall, the book is a well-written, quick read and essential for those who are just getting started with form design.  For those in the user experience community, the book has a few interesting new takes, but may be a bit basic.  However, if that were really true, we wouldn’t have so many bad form designs.

Two versions of the book, print & digital ($36) and digital only ($19), go on sale this Thursday.  Members of the visual thinking community are eligible for a 10% discount using the code FOVIZTHINK at the Rosenfeld Media website:

http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/

Check back here later this week for a podcast with Luke!

Podcast 11: What qualifies as visual language anyway?

In the visual thinking community, we frequently use the term visual language.  Some would say that it gets used pretty loosely.  So, today we began that discussion with 3 experts in our field in order to begin to understand what visual language really means.  Neil Cohn, Yuri Engelhardt, and Dave Gray joined us to discuss topics like:

What is a visual language?
Does a visual language require a grammar?
What components make up a visual grammar?
Are certain forms of visualization a language and others not?

Not surprisingly, we come up with as many questions as we do answers.  Our experts find some areas of agreement and plenty of areas ripe for further podcasts and live debates.  For your convenience, we’re trying out a new format that divides the podcast into 11 digestible segments.  Just click on the clip your interested in to skip around.

Hint: Use the Full Screen Button to see this video in greater detail.

You may also download the audio here…

MP3 Audio File

VizThink London & Austin

It’s so exciting to see what’s going on in the community.  Just a couple days ago, over 35 people gathered from all over London for the first meeting of visual thinkers there.  They had quite the mix of people from graphic designers to internal communications to musical theatre producers who all came together to talk about visualization.  The topic this time was “Why Visual Communications?”  They even got some great photos from the event.  The event was such a success, they’ve already planned their next one for July 10th.  Many thanks to Tom & Ricky for getting this kicked off!

There’s even more exciting news from the community front.  VizThink Austin is just 10 days away from their first event which is being held on April 30th.  To sign up, just add your name to the wiki.  Charlene, Sunni, and Marilyn have done a great job getting this going.  So, all of you from the Austin area be sure to sign up and stop by!

Remember, these local communities are always free.  Attend, present, participate, learn, network, and have a little fun.

With London, Toronto and Austin already established, is your city next?  If you would like to start a VizThink community started in your area, please let us know at info (at) vizthink (dot) com.

New Community Resource: Ryan Coleman

For months, we’ve been saying that while VizThink is hosting several events, our goal is to build a sustainable community.   We’ve just taken the next step in making that vision a reality.  We’ve just hired Ryan Coleman to be our Chief Community Evangelist.  In his new role, Ryan will be responsible for helping the local communities get started (London, Austin, and Toronto already are running with many more to come), building an online community and social network for people around the world, and providing tools and resources for the visual thinking community members.

When Ryan starts on May 1st, he won’t be starting from scratch.  He comes with an amazing array of great experience including starting several businesses, starting several communities (not the least of which is the very successful VizThink Toronto), and organizing/hosting the very popular audience-determined events known as BarCamp.  At our event in San Francisco, he led a well-attended & received session on building a local VizThink community.

We are so excited to have him on the team!  Be sure to send him a note or post your congratulations in the comments here.  Welcome Ryan!

Navigating Comics

Neil Cohn just published new research on how layout of a comics page influences the order in which participants view the page in the United States.  In this study he explores how several layout choices (without content) impact the reader’s approach to a page:

Z-path (the perceived order in which most people in the U.S. read a comic)

Blockage

Staggering

Separation

Overlap

Entry Point

This study shows that layouts (even without content) can have an impact on the order in which readers approach a page.  While I doubt the research is necessarily directly transferrable to other domains, for those developing comics or comic-like stories, there are some interesting principles to be learned from this study.  Let’s hope for even more research!

Click here to download a copy of the study from Neil’s website.

Save The Dates! Announcing VizThink Europe & North America

We’ve been working hard on many new opportunities for visual thinkers.  We’ve recently announced workshops and regional groups, and even have more big announcements coming next week.  Right now, though, we want you to SAVE THE DATES:

VizThink Europe ’08
Berlin, Germany
October 12 – 14, 2008
Registration Opens Next Week!

VizThink North America ’09
San Jose, California
February 22 – 25, 2009
Registration Opens in August!

We’re really excited about these two events.  We’ll have all new content at each one, great facilitators from all over the globe, and lots of opportunity for networking, discovery, and best practice sharing with your visual thinking colleagues from around the world.

Your feedback from San Francisco was tremendous, and we’re trying to incorporate much of it into these upcoming events.  We’ll be talking about many of the enhancements right here on the blog over the coming months.

We look forward to seeing you in person at one of these events.  Be sure to block the dates on your calendar now!

Announcing even more community resources

Watch or listen this 2 minute, 3 second podcast for information about new regional communities and upcoming events including the VizThink London community:

Hint: Use the Full Screen Button to see this video in greater detail.

You may also download the audio here…

MP3 Audio File

Visualization Information Workshop Registrations

Just a reminder that we have two very interesting workshops coming up:

Friday, May 02, 2008 – New York
Wednesday, May 07, 2008 – Chicago

Here’s a description of the upcoming sessions:

Visualizing Information: A one-day workshop with Karl Gude and Dave Gray

Participants will learn how visual thinking can be used to explore complex information and present it more effectively. This workshop combines high-level design principles with practical applications-–rules of thumb and “tricks of the trade”–that professional information designers use to quickly create clear representations from complex or potentially confusing information.

Participants will learn through a series of hands-on exercises, designed to develop their analytical, design and visual thinking abilities.  Workshop facilitators Karl Gude and Dave Gray have, collectively, more than 50 years of practical, hands-on experience, creating visual explanations for national news media and multinational corporations.

Topics covered include:
- Introduction to visual language and visual literacy
- Strategies of information design
- Primary methods for organizing both qualitative and quantitative information
- Professional tips and tricks

Your presentations don’t have to be dull and ridden with bullet points. After this workshop you will understand how to explore, organize and visually display information of all kinds, from complex data sets to visual instruction manuals.

Register Now at http://www.vizthink.com/workshops!

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