A Matter Of Degree

Visual Display of Information Meets Web 2.0

20080817 - I feel honored to be included, originally uploaded by sadalit.

I got an email this week from one of the folks at We Feel Fine, asking permission to use one of my photos in a book project. Because of this email I discovered their incredible website. The application is beautiful, engaging, and really moving. This screen capture hardly shows the experience - it's so much better in action.

In the words of the website's creators:

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been studying human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.

Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20’s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life."

Gripe about the field description placement in SharePoint

Some of my clients are complaining about the placement of the field description in SharePoint forms, and I agree with them. When you create a field, or column, you have the opportunity to enter descriptive text that will appear on the form, which can be valuable in telling your users how they should fill out the field. However, this text appears below the field data, which is inconvenient for single-line fields, but which really poses a problem when the fields are more complex:

Your instructive field description gets lost, and may even make users have to do double work if they read your instructions after they've already entered data (not to mention the fact that if you're converting a paper form, you'll have to think about the descriptions as you enter them and not use terms like "below").

One of my clients was ambitious enough to create a custom form specifically to solve this problem. She placed the descriptive text below the field name, using a slightly different type style for the description than for the field name. The hitch is that custom forms need to be created from scratch; you can't modify a list's existing New, Edit, or View forms in SharePoint Designer to make a relatively simple change like this. If you want the descriptive text to appear consistently on both New and Edit forms, you'll have to create two forms. In my client's case, the investment of time and effort was justified because her internal customers gave the description placement high priority in their requirements, and because the form is a fairly long one which will be used regularly by every employee in the organization. But smaller, simpler, or less-frequently-used forms may not justify the extra hours it would take to customize them.

Now here's the really maddening thing. Microsoft has placed the field descriptions under the field name on some of their own internal forms, for example, the Change Column form for any list or library:

Which raises the question: If Microsoft's form designers decided that this was a good placement for the field description, why don't end-user list and library forms have the same layout? Why are content owners forced to work with (or around) a less-intuitive design?

This is one of the big items on my wish list for the next release.

Greg LeMond Keynote at the SharePoint 2008 Conference

20080305 - LeMond Keynote at SharePoint 2008 Conference, originally uploaded by sadalit.

This morning I attended the keynote by Greg LeMond. His small company (16 people) uses SharePoint; he believes it is “what the future is for working together.”

Among the many themes of his talk (never give up, have ambitious goals in mind, be confident yet keep your nervousness about the possibility of losing, be passionate about what you do, have a partner that believes in you & supports you), the most notable for me was the concept of averaging your days – some days you’re ahead, some you are behind, but it’s the overall trend that is important.

The Tour de France is a great model of this – the racers are acutely aware of where they stand both on a daily basis and overall - you can “win” an individual day or days but lose the race, and conversely, you shouldn't give up hope if you lose the day - you could still come out on top.

Weight loss is another example – losing a certain amount of weight is an effort that can be tracked with hard numbers on a daily basis, to reveal a trend line. If you slip occasionally and indulge by overeating, your trend can still be toward loss.

What if the achievement of your goal is harder to measure? How can you grasp (and feel good about) the overall if the numbers aren't in front of your face every day? Even if you have well-defined metrics for success (a critical first step toward performance measurement that is often overlooked), how can you increase their visibility?

MOSS 2007 offers tools to make your overall performance trend more visible and easier to comprehend.  If you don't have the time or resources to implement a business data catalog, you can still take advantage of the key performance indicator web parts just by putting together a simple Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list.  Which of your company's goals would be good candidates for a simple graphical display on a SharePoint home page?  On-time employee timesheet submission?  Trainings or certifications achieved across the company?  Number of new projects opened this month compared to previous months?

For me, LeMond's message was an important one to keep front of mind - not to dwell on a failure, but to learn from it and focus on the overall upward trend.  In the future as I work with my customers I'll encourage them to do the same for their companies, using SharePoint as the enabling tool.

NPR's Audio Bar Graphs

Last week NPR got a lot of flak for their spots on presidential fundraising results as represented by seconds of music.  They played "Staying Alive" for Democrats and "I Will Survive" for Republicans.  Listeners responded that these spots were "stupid" and "grating," but I admire NPR's creative use of sound length to represent numbers.  We do so much data analysis with our eyes; why not format information for the ears, especially when it's going to be consumed in situations like driving, when the eyes are otherwise occupied?

Science backs me up on this.  See Seed Magazine's article on sonification of data:  "Auditory representation enables recognition of "certain patterns...that you wouldn't be able to see in the [visual] sense," said Marty Woldorff, associate director of Duke's Center for Cognitive Neurosciences and an expert in sensory perception. Vision tends to work best for spatial data, naturally, but it's been established that we process temporal information better by hearing it. For instance, abnormal patterns in EEGs are better grasped by ear than eye, allowing for a quicker diagnosis of epilepsy and other disorders."

And even dearer to my not-quite-a-programmer heart, see the University of Northumbria's research on troubleshooting software bugs by sound:  "The constructs of the Pascal programming language can be categorized hierarchically into two classes -- selections and iterations -- which, in turn, have sub-classes... For instance, in the iteration class, the language has a pair of similar bounded loops,: "FOR... TO" and "FOR... DOWNTO". It also has a pair of unbounded loops: "REPEAT" and "WHILE". The researchers used a common theme for each class, and wrote musical motifs that were variations on that theme to make the similar REPEAT and WHILE loops sound distinct, but more similar to each other than to the bounded loops. At the same time, all four of the phrases representing loops sounded similar enough to each other that they could be distinguished as being in the iteration class rather than the selection class."

I'd love to give my eyes a rest and be able to do at least part of my job by listening to data rather than staring at a computer screen.  Maybe in my next life I'll be a piano tuner; until then I urge those NPR complainers to re-think their criticism.  You don't have to like the song selections, but the concept really works.