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Malcolm Davison (www.writingfortheweb.co.uk) looks at how you can harness the power of imagery on the web to convey complex processes.
In the mid 90s, websites would grind to a halt as we waited for large images and animations to appear - for some modem users that can still be true today. Do you remember the exasperating download times of imagery at Boo.com a few years ago? Many companies learned the hard way that large images and bold design concepts can kill site traffic. But as Broadband makes greater inroads into the consumer market and intranet networks become more powerful images are making a comeback. In recent years there has been exciting work going on in universities and research centres around the world to develop new ways to convey complex information onto a single screen. This is nothing new. Power stations have been using visual representations of generation and distribution for years. Oil refineries and chemical plants rely on them to keep on top of production - and railway signal boxes and air traffic control systems employ models of the real world that they are dealing with. I can remember as a young engineer working on the design of a complex switch panel for the control room of Heathrow Airport Cargo Tunnel, it helped the operations staff to monitor the effectiveness of the ventilation and safety systems. That, I confess, was 35 years ago. But imagine for a moment that you could select the characteristics of your new boss - such as humour, ability, generosity and approachability - by adjusting three slider bars with your computer mouse. Wouldn't that be great? Well that is just one type of control we can expect to see used more widely in the future on the web. Take for example Christopher Williamson's Boulder County Dynamic Homefinder (http://dq.com/homefind/index.html). This enables the homebuyer to select the perfect house from an estate agent's database of available property. By setting slider bars for distance to your workplace, the cost of the property, the number of bedrooms, the year built - it will display all the locations of matching properties on a map of the area. One neat graphic allows the user to simply access information embedded in a large database on the web server. Pages and pages of data are effectively compressed onto a single screen - isolating just the subset of information the user needs to know. Ben Schneiderman*, a professor and founder of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, is one of the pioneers of visualisation. His department has developed, zoomable interfaces that can give an overview of a large project. but also allow you to zoom into any part and see the finest detail. The department has also invented fisheye menus, treemaps and much more. We are already familiar with virtual museums, timelines, 360-degree panoramas, 3D maps, web cams, Flash animation and virtual tours. The repertoire for the communicator to convey complex ideas visually is growing all the time. The use of imagery in this way cannot be done on paper and gives added reason to publish on the web. It has the added benefit that the user can interact and even do original research using the systems provided. It also means that words are not always the sharpest tool in the box! *Further reading: 'Leonardo's Laptop - Human needs and the new computing technologies' a book written by Ben Schneiderman. |
