Alex Faaborg

Yesterday Justin Dolske and I spent the day attending a course by Edward Tufte called Presenting Data and Information.

Tufte is all about the high-resolution-high-bandwidth-multi-variable-insanely-complex-data-dump. At one point he stated that since people have a 150 megapixel visual system, it is technically impossible to overload them with complexity on a computer screen, since it simply can’t hold enough information. He loves the financial section of print newspapers (which shows 50,000 numbers on a page), and he hates PowerPoint (which shows 8). While his principles of analytical design make a lot of sense for information consumption, not all of them translate well to the domain of interface design. After a day of hearing the virtues of complexity, I feel like reading John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity just to balance things out.

I think some of his ideas could potentially impact Firefox however, especially for building tools to enable power users in vertical markets. For instance, one of his principles of analytic design is to seamlessly “integrate words, numbers and images.” He refers to small high resolution graphics inline with text as datawords, like this: . Mixing graphics inline with text could impact how we think about Live Titles. Justin has already proposed Graphical Microsummaries, and I think this feature could really help users consume information faster.