Statistician Reporting Application: Data Visualization in Macromedia Flash MX 2004

The Challenges of Visualizing Data

Data in itself is well, just plain data – and it needs to have a level of "presentation" that enables the user to view and recognize it. Many websites, such as most e-commerce sites, are simply user-friendly visual presentations of huge piles of data. Simply put, these are huge databases of data presented in a visually appealing way or, in other words, examples of data visualization. Designing for data visualization presents many challenges that require the proper solution. We found out quickly that the end goal of visualizing the data behind Statistician required us to examine many different challenges and figure out the best way to tackle them.

Choosing the Best Architecture

Initially when designing for data visualization you need to make an overall choice on how to present the data. What operating system will your user have? What platform will they be using? Through what program or method will your data be presented? If your data, like ours, will be presented over the web, what browsers will be used? Any of these factors can cause a restructure in the way you build the application and can also weigh negatively upon other factors that come into play.

Presentation Challenges: User Interface Design

The goal of data visualization is to present data in a way that makes it easy to view and understand – much more than just viewing the data itself. Within the realm of data visualization, it’s important to have a solid user interface design that allows for presentation of data to be made in an efficient and easily understandable manner.

Let’s face it. As designers and developers, it’s tough to design for all users in mind. It’s much easier to design for a single audience – for example if you’re a Macromedia Flash developer, it might be easier to design using small pixel fonts and similar screen elements for your fellow Flash developers to understand and appreciate. But when designing for a more global audience, there are many factors to take into consideration-- font choices and sizes, placement/spacing of elements, color choices, and more.

Guiding User Interactions: Functionality, Consistency, and Usability

Right alongside the challenges of creating a well-designed and efficient user interface is the need to define the "meaning" beyond just the choice of visual elements and overall style. Great-looking fonts, buttons, icons and other screen elements need a reason why they look the way they do, why they’re placed in specific locations, or even more so, why they’re there in the first place.

Creating a solid, usable user interface to visualize large amounts of data within an application is critical. This level of usability makes the application not only functional, but makes it more efficient and valuable to users because they’ll be able to understand it better. Nothing can ruin a beautiful user interface more than users being confused about how to operate it. Remember that well-designed and usable user interfaces aren’t just beautiful to the eye; they are pleasing to the mind – where the visualized data is not only viewed but processed.

Capturing User Appeal: Drawing In and Keeping the User’s Interest

If your data isn’t appealing to the user, you can’t expect anyone other than the most diehard people (maybe just you) to spend a sufficient amount of time using it. You must consider another level of presentation design to keep the user interested in the data.

As with most forms of data that must be visualized in a better way, Statistician’s data itself is fairly unattractive, so we applied a level of beautification to make the data appealing to the viewer. With the Statistician Reporting Application, this proved to be quite a challenge and was a major driver behind how we designed the application.

Application Extensibility: Staying Flexible for Future Expansion

With data visualization, the back end that drives the data will often change and expand, which will require the application that you use to present the data visually to expand. As with any application, leaving flexibility within the architecture and user interface for future expansion is a very good idea.

For the Statistician Reporting Application, a challenge that we needed to face was the need to be flexible to accommodate the ever-increasing number of clients and Macromedia Flash demos that would be Flash-tracking-enabled. The user interface would need to be flexible for not only the variable amount of data that would be visualized, but also for potential changes to the architecture of the data captured by the database server.

For example, Statistician itself provides capability of tracking user events within any Flash movie exported for Macromedia Flash Player 6.0 or higher. The Statistician Reporting Application needed to be built in a way that corresponds to this level of flexibility as well to maintain a level of consistency between Flash movies and the reporting application. Within the reporting application, this included the navigation area being dynamic in a sense as to allow for consistency with Flash movie structure. Also, custom charts and data analysis areas needed to be flexible enough to handle visualizing large amounts of varying data.

Figure 2. Navigation consistency between client Product Demo and reporting application

Page 2 of 6

Previous Page

Next Page