Interactive Visualization: Insight through Inquiry

by Bill Ferster, Ben Shneiderman (Foreword)

A guide to fundamental issues in designing interactive visualizations, exploring ideas of inquiry, design, structured data, and usability. Interactive visualization is emerging as a vibrant new form of communication, providing compelling presentations that allow viewers to interact directly with information in order to construct their own understandings of it. Building on a long tradition of print-based information visualization, interactive visualization utilizes the technological capabilities of computers, the Internet, and computer graphics to marshal multifaceted information in the service of making a point visually. This book offers an introduction to the field, presenting a framework for exploring historical, theoretical, and practical issues. It is not a “how-to” book tied to specific and soon-to-be-outdated software tools, but a guide to the concepts that are central to building interactive visualization projects whatever their ultimate form. The framework the book presents (known as the ASSERT model, developed by the author), allows the reader to explore the process of interactive visualization in terms of choosing good questions to ask; finding appropriate data for answering them; structuring that information; exploring and analyzing the data; representing the data visually; and telling a story using the data. Interactive visualization draws on many disciplines to inform the final representation, and the book reflects this, covering basic principles of inquiry, data structuring, information design, statistics, cognitive theory, usability, working with spreadsheets, the Internet, and storytelling.

Genres: Design

275 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2012

Reviews

[Laurian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, this is a pretty decent summary if you are a beginner to junior level UX person who is interested in InfoVis, particularly if you are interested in how people use InfoVis for education. As it stands, there wasn't much that I didn't get in my InfoVis class a decade ago and/or reading/skimming the proceedings of the InfoVis conference for the last few years.

What I was looking for was a book that was practical. So, for example, if you have 2 gigs of categorical and time-based data that people are currently looking at in massive tables, what are some ways to help start visualizing that data. What are the considerations you need to balance such as lag time, visual prominence, applying filters on huge data (because some data disappears and people never notice), and in general, how to mitigate basic downfalls of big data visualizations and a users interaction with them. This was not the book. There was a whole lot of theory and not a whole lot of practical application. Again, great for beginners who are trying to grasp the concept, but I expected more.

If you are looking for more practically based books, I'm a big fan of Stephen Few.

Very well written; it was very clear and concise. It just wasn't the book for me.