Dressed Up to Distraction

Whatever theyre drinking at Forrester Research, please keep it out of my water. The research companys report on May 17, envisioning what it calls The X Internet, misperceives the Internets advantages and ignores decades of research into effective data presentation. I shudder when I read comments such as, “Imagine a corporate buyer navigating a virtual marketplace with a Doom-like user interface—buyers could simply shoot the deals they want.” Those are the words of Carl Howe, Forrester research director, who suggests that this would parallel the evolution of TV to modern visual treatments of weather, sports and news.

I suggest that Howe is confusing distracting eye candy (bad) with data visualization (good). Im a huge fan of data visualization. Back in the days of text-only terminals, IBM had a terrific advertisement for what was then the novel idea of color text displays: An abnormal value jumped out of the clutter immediately when shown in a distinctive color. There are some things that our brains do very well, and for most people, that includes quick detection of color and movement.

At the same time, though, brief fascinations with exotic presentation keep coming back to what works. Look at the instruments on a modern automobile dashboard: white numbers on a black background, arranged in a circular arc with a moving needle. Its an old idea, but it works.

Forrester CEO and Chairman George Colony faults the Internet for presenting “essentially the same content offered on paper.” But paper presentations represent years of research into what people readily understand, and the Internets presentations are more timely than paper can be. Timely is good. Clear is good. Gratuitously complex is bad, and I thought that this was old news.