Last year around the time of my thesis preparation at NYU's ITP program, I remember going off on tangents to seek out research papers on information seeking, document management, making information meaningful: subjects that I am still passionate about.
Thus my deep interest in the Semantic web, and the technologies that will enable more context to be brought into web documents. To be able to harvest deeply from the huge data out there on the internet, to be able to retrieve just the information that a user will find useful, & even further, bringing just-in-time information to her through intelligent systems: how delicious! Like I was half-joking with my students in the Information Architecture class at NYU, we'll need to coin a new word for such information-seeking: search implies an effort on the part of the user, the next five years will have information coming to her, when she needs it, how she needs it. And guess what, we may not need a term for it, for ideally it should be so transparently woven into the design!
RSS feeds are a great development in recent times with information coming to me; and yet it is very easy to be inundated with that too! I had painstakingly put together my feeds in Awasu, but I dare not open the application now: it's overwhelmingly overloaded! A more manageable way seems to be the personal pages such as MS Start page, or one that I particularly like:
www.netvibes.com. You can set it as your Home page, so you don't need to remember to fire it up! Also, the clean interface, ajax interactions, & one-page access make information much more usable.
Another area that I am recently finding very interesting, & am digging deeper into is that of data analytics & modeling. My company
DecisionCraft is doing excellent work in these areas. To dig into gigabytes of raw data, & to use math & statistics to reveal valuable patterns & insights for future action, is truly catching on with the savvy companies: Amazon being a prime example of a very quantitatively-driven organization, and one where one sees, as a user, the tremendous impact their analytics approach is yielding.
Last week, I participated in a webcast titled 'Competing on Analytics'by Ben Schneiderman of the University of Maryland . He presented some of the work they have done in working with large data sets in assorted industries: hospital & patient records being one. What was very fascinating to me was the visualization of that data (I'll admit it takes a bit of a trained eye to see some of the patterns that he saw, while I was thinking "where, what") , & the ability to drill down into as much detail as the doctor cared to. To be able to see a visualization of say the blood pressure history of a patient over the last 5 years, and further, to be able to see if there is any relationship between this & his worsening arthritis, & to be able to predict potential health problems down the road is very powerful indeed.
I also got an opportunity to ask Schneiderman a question that had been bothering me for quite a while: Most information visualization tools depend on color to convey key patterns. So what about accessibility concerns, the color-blind for example. His answer: most of the tools we have designed allow users to determine the colors they'd like to use, or they could opt for gray-scale too. He adds that you can make the question even harder & ask "what about the blind, can they ever use these tools?". Well, he said, he have worked on a design, it's still in prototype, that translates these patterns into audio. Hmm, sounds interesting, one would need to see, rather hear how effective that is.
Check out Ben Schneiderman's work at
www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/Tags: Data Analytics, Data Modeling, data Mining,Information Architecture
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