Visualization techniques could improve web experience if companies adopt them

Canada’s medical and scientific sectors are using advanced navigation tools that promise to bring a new level of simplicity to the commercial Internet and computer applications, a conference on visualization recently heard. Visualization, which is still in its infancy, provides better graphic clues to manipulating data and surfing web sites. The head of one prominent company in the field says since there are no technological hurdles to implementing the tools, it’s simply a matter of waiting until the ‘Net world wakes up to the possibilities. "It could be everywhere tomorrow, like walking into a room and turning on the lights," Ramana Rao, chief technology officer of CA-based Inxight Software Inc, told Canadian NEW MEDIA. Rao’s comments came at the 2nd Workshop on Information Visualization held in Ottawa May 23, sponsored by the National Research Council, Nortel Networks and others, and organized by the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation. At the conference, Rao demonstrated a Java-based navigation system that Inxight designed for Yahoo which uses an animated "tree" to drill down through multiple menus using only click-and-drag mouse actions. He says the system is more intuitive than current icon- and link-based navigation and doesn’t require a steep learning curve for users. "There’s some portion wired in," he explains. "You don’t have to be a Ph.D." Navigation tools which represent information as visual clues are expected to become widespread eventually. Once widely deployed, they may follow the same course as graphical user interfaces, which also took time to become ubiquitous. In the meantime, Rao says, it’s only natural that visualization is most commonly found in the scientific community where large databases of information can be represented visually, such as in the field of genomics. Rao says scientific and geographic pursuits have the greatest money backing them compared to the dot com world. The conference’s keynote speaker, noted researcher Ben Shneiderman, told delegates that visualization is only now gaining strength outside the medical and scientific fields. "This topic, which started as a crazy idea 10 or 12 years ago, has gained force. Companies are now crossing the chasm to commercial products." He says the challenge is to move the field away from simplistic notions of "user-friendly" to more scientific, multi-disciplinary examinations of how people use computers. When a scientific approach is applied to how people navigate sites, applications and databases, he says the research can be applied to more commercial products. Eventually, he claims that any site which doesn’t give a graphical overview of its database will be considered unprofessional. "That Windows system which shows 6 or 8 windows and 60 icons isn’t very effective," he says of current GUIs. As an example of future applications, he demonstrated a three-dimensional showcase of the music of Phillip Glass which allows users to move in 3D space to drill down multiple categories of information, including multimedia clips. The dynamics are new, he told conference participants, and designers have to understand that interfaces should be interactive, and not designed with print or static page displays in mind. The challenge still faced by researchers, however, is how to show information that’s not physically in close proximity in graphic form. He notes that in the medical or scientific fields, three dimensional objects can be represented on a computer screen easily. That’s not the case for most information that people are looking for, which usually has little physical basis on which to base a visualization. As examples, he cites the contents of a library, the stock market or personal relationships. "We’re really just at the first stage of information visualization, which is trying to understand how we visualize information. The commercial successes are when we solve problems," Shneiderman says.

Visualization techniques could improve web experience if companies adopt them

Broadcast | June 14, 2001

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