A Methodology for Designing Visual Information Displays

Software	None OR language with good support for graphic interfaces
Covers	Requirements analysis, system development methodologies, graphical representations of information
Skills Required	Systems analysis, possibly diagrammatic notations, not afraid of simple statistics
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ?? Programming

Brief Description

A very important part of computer support for management decision making (indeed, paper support for management decision making) is the effective use of graphical representations to show information visually. A lot of graphical information presentation is very poor: ugly, uninformative, confusing or downright misleading, so there's plenty of scope for improvement. How can we select or design effective visual representations of what decision makers really need to know? Are we dependent on flashes of genius or on trawling haphazardly though collections of information graphics for something that might be suitable, or can we do better than that?

The primary objective of this project is to design a methodology for analysing decision makers' requirements for information graphics, and designing appropriate and effective information graphics to meet these requirements. This will incorporate both guidelines for the design of effective graphics (see Edward R. Tufte's three marvellous books, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations), a set of procedures for gathering and evaluating requirements, and a set of procedures for selecting and designing graphic information displays to meet those requirements.

Extensions

Do an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of your methodology.

Design and (ideally) build a computer tool to support the use of your methodology.

Specify requirements for an information system building tool that would support the implementation (in an information system or a decision support system) of graphic displays of information developed using your methodology.

Use a formal method for describing the properties of graphic representations of information (such as ERMIA).

Devise one or more new and brilliant ways to display information graphically.

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