Learning Outcomes
Understand:
- why people look for information, which strategies they use, and how this can be accommodated in user interface design
- the role of information visualisation within user interface design, and how to design a good visualisation
Remember:
- definition of information seeking
- definition of information poverty
- definition of information visualisation
- ASSERT model for designing visualisations
- Trifecta model for assessing visualisations
Apply:
- Use Wilson’s model of information seeking behaviour to describe how somebody uses Google
- Use the ASSERT model to develop a visualisation, and Kaiser Fung’s trifecta to criticise it
Preparing for the Lecture
I have put together a slide deck (Week8Information) that covers the main aspects of interacting with information. As you will see, interacting with information is far more than visualisation. It is about asking a question and getting the answer, it is about interpreting what you see, it is about making sure that the information you are working with is sound.
This is the point that Kaiser Fung makes in his trifecta for assessing information visualisation. You need to have a clear question, you need to be clear about what the data says, and you need to express this in your visual. Those trifecta can also be generalised to other ways of reporting information, such as text and key statistics.
A good rundown of basic options for information visualisation is given by the Information Visualisation Zoo by Jeff Heer.
There are many models of what happens when people look for information. To start you off, I would like you to consider Wilson’s review on information behaviour (i.e., what people do when they seek out information). This paper is relatively old, dating from 1999, but it is useful in two ways. First, it sets out the multitude of approaches that can be taken to analysing how people look for information, and secondly, it is a nice fit with the overall model that we’ve encountered in the Ritter et al. textbook. The Social factors correspond to the person in context / the context of information need, while the “intervening variables” and the “information seeking behaviour” parts cover Behavioural and Cognitive aspects. You will also find aspects of human behaviour that we haven’t really looked at yet, such as stress/ coping and self efficacy.
Finally, I’d like to encourage you to think about cases when information is just not available, or hard to obtain. This is what is meant by Information Poverty. A detailed case study of information poverty was put together by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), when they investigated whether children whose sexual orientation does not conform to heterosexual norms, and whose gender identity does not correspond to the gender identity assigned at birth, can access resources that can help them cope.
Report: Don’t Filter Me.
Core Readings
This week is not covered by our textbook. The key book which I used for preparing the information visualisation component was Bill Ferster’s Interactive Visualisation (MIT Press, 2013). If you’d like to read more around the topic and the general approach, look at Kaiser Fung’s Junk Charts web site, or Edward Tufte’s web site .