AlexAitken.net

Al­most all ap­plicatons we in­ter­act with on the web are form driv­en. User-sup­plied data in; sys­tem con­clu­sion out. To be sure, a dec­ade plus of ex­per­i­en­ce and in­nov­a­tion has seen UX im­prove by leaps and bounds. But we’re still build­ing forms, and to that end I al­ways en­joy re-vis­it­ing the ba­sic ques­tion of how to build them well. Here’s the es­sence of a re­cent stab.

Ed­ward Tufte is Yale Uni­versity Pro­fess­or Emer­it­us of Polit­ic­al Sci­ence, Stat­ist­ics, and Com­puter Sci­ence. Through his work in these do­mains and the four books he has pub­lished on the dis­play and con­sump­tion of data, Tufte has come to be best–re­cog­nized as a mas­ter of in­fograph­ic and visu­al in­ter­face design. In his per­en­ni­al one-day course on Present­ing Data and In­form­a­tion, he teaches his view on ef­fect­ive visu­al com­mu­nic­a­tion through ex­amples drawn from across eras and me­dia.

Even at the time it de­b­uted dur­ing my os­tens­ible un­der­age years I re­mem­ber be­ing im­pressed by the bril­liance of Jim Beam’s ‘You al­ways come back to ba­sics’ ad cam­paign. The ori­gin­al, which ran in the Oc­to­ber 1989 is­sue of 16 na­tion­al magazines, de­pic­ted a pro­gres­sion of Amer­ica’s pre­ferred food­stuff over 5 dec­ades. A series of 7 pho­tos in­cluded 1955’s ham­burger, then a hero sand­wich in 1975 and bean sprouts in pita bread for 1983 be­fore re­turn­ing to the ham­burger as the go-to of 1990. Sub­sequent vari­ations played the same trick with box­er shorts, re­cord al­bums, salt and pep­per shakers…