Data Flow

While walking around Berlin, I saw an interesting book,  Data Flow , on a table in a bookstore in the NeuroTitan gallery. The book is showcase of a lot of interesting visualizations and is very inspirational.

Data visualization is becoming very important for the future application. With all the opportunities opened by  RIA applications you have to think about different way to design your applications: you can use both the web interaction patterns and usual desktop application’s ones. And the given that, the information architecture is different as well.

One important fact to remember is that if you have to represent complex information, you have to explain the meaning of the objects you use in your application to the end user, either in a direct way or making the “meaning” of the object very simple to discover. And once decided what a certain interface object does, use it in a consistent way throughout all the screens of the application.

The taxonomies have an important role to help the developers, because they use a clear paradigma to manage data and term meaning. You can apply them to your RIA application and declare it to the users so that they know how to use the same “vocabulary”.

I’ll speak about this and other RIA design techniques in May, at the all4Web conference, in Milano.
I think that I’ll come on this topic one more time in the future.
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Technorati tags: UIX, WPF, RIA, data visualization,Adobe flex,microsoft silverlight