

Ask HN: Design Resources for Developers? - vital101

I've been working on a side project for quite some time and have been skirting around the issue of design.  I started out using Bootstrap, then purchased a nice looking design from ThemeForest and hacked it to my needs.  Even with my lack of design skills, it's actually starting to look pretty nice.<p>The problem I'm having is how to visualize data.  Users rate an item on a scale of 1 - 10 for how often that item was required.  For instance, a rating of 1 would mean "I needed this item infrequently.  Chances are you won't need it either." and a rating of 10 would mean "I needed this item all the time.  You will need it.".  When the user is entering the rating, it's easy enough to have a quick text description of how it works, however when you're browsing through reviews without that context it's hard to tell what a rating 1 - 10 actually means.<p>Are there any good design resources out there for visualizing data?  I need to figure out how to display that kind of data in a way that can be interpreted and understood at a glance.<p>Thanks.
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vitovito
There are actually three issues here:

1\. Are reviewers rating the data using the right scale/format? 1-10 might
mean one thing to you and something different to someone else. 1-10 might be
inappropriate when you really mean a multiple choice, 1 of N text
descriptions. Different types of inputs mean reviewers will _think about
things_ differently, and also mean you'll have to process your data
differently to get an appropriate visualization.

2\. What are browsers trying to get out of it? Maybe those ratings, or their
descriptions, are helpful in the general case. Maybe they're only really
helpful when someone actually wants to make a decision. Maybe browsing _by
rating_ instead of by product is how things should be sorted. There's any
number of possibilities in how potential browsers might use your service,
regardless of your intent.

3\. Only after you know those things can you decide on an appropriate
visualization, and I must warn you that something that looks really attractive
and draws people in and gets people to say how awesome your site is is not
necessarily the visualization that will be most useful. In addition, most-
useful-at-a-glance is not the same as most-useful-after-I-understand-it or
most-useful-with-a-lot-of-practice.

This sort of thing is why an actual designer is useful. You've got a lot of
encoded assumptions and we're trained to break them down.

That said, to answer your question, even though it might be the wrong
question, there's a great O'Reilly book called "Information Dashboard Design"
which explains how to make data visualizations that are actually useful.

After you get through that, you might look for an old book called "Using
Charts & Graphs" by Jan V. White. It's out of print, so finding a copy might
be hard, but it's the opposite of the Tufte books someone will invariably
suggest, but which are inappropriate for you. "Using Charts & Graphs"
specifically talks about what we now call infographics: telling a story using
a chart or a graph.

(Tufte's books are inappropriate here because they're textbooks for print
people, and while they have lots of good information, implementing their
takeaways in electronic form is left as an exercise to the reader. It's way
too much work for this situation.)

You might also try to dig up the work done by Summize back in 2007/2008,
before they were acquired by Twitter.

Finally, if you'd like to talk more about this with an actual designer, you
might be interested in a design "office hours" experiment I'm running, called
UX Hours: <http://uxhours.com/>. For comparison, this well-defined question,
resulting in advice on things to consider and two places to find out what you
need to do, is just about right for a 30 minute consult.

~~~
vital101
Thank you so much for your reply. I think you're correct in that I'm going to
need to challenge a lot of my assumptions with regards to visualizing this
data.

I have a few designer friends that I'll talk this out with over beer sometime,
but I also look forward to reading your book recommendations.

Thanks!

