Michael Wilcox's Blog

When the BBC changes its homepage its likely that quite a few people will notice: they have over 9 million unique browser views per week. So they do it carefully… with a lot of explanation and a beta launch.

In the blog they talk about enabling serendipitous discovery, with a link to a talk from Director of Future Media, Ralph Rivera. The slides spell out a strategy for BBC Online which is elegantly described in a very visual way:

Visualisation has been around for ages – we all learnt how to do pie charts at school for example… but the current trend of making data open – led largely by the public sector – with large data sets becoming available, combined with the emergence of free and easy to use technical tools, are creating an exciting new practice in story telling.

A very interesting film (54 minutes) about this is available at the infosthetics.com website.

The film includes suggestions that whilst the new tools make it easy for anyone to create visualisations, there’s scope here for it to be done badly.

In Information Services we have a requirement to provide expert and professional support to our academic colleagues and students. I think this is an area we need to watch closely, understand well and start to provide as a defined, supported service. Getting visualisation right will enable us (the University) to help academics tell better stories, and that outcome has all sorts of benefits (better communication, more impact, improved public understanding of science).

In addition to the above film, advice is available on creating effective, usable and accessible visualisations from WebCredible.

Look also at the Guardian’s data store, IBM’s Many Eyes, the BBC’s How big really site, and there are of course many more sites on this subject…

Fabulous piece in the SitePoint Design View newsletter today. Comic Sans is the font that we all hate – right? And yet it won’t die. No school web site or newsletter is fit for purpose without it. It’s used a lot by a lot of people in a lot of places. I trained (years ago) as a designer so I’m qualified to pontificate about this…

…but the article suggests that a piece of research, soon to be published, showed that the use of Comic Sans in a particular type of survey enticed more information from the participants.

NB: Having followed the links, its clear that the research is about more than just Comic Sans. Entitled "Why Do Consumers Disclose Sensitive Information to Shady-Looking Websites?" it looks at a range of graphic devices (cartoon devil logo, text-speak) being employed to set a tone in the article.

But nevertheless, the SitePoint article goes on to suggest we should A/B split test Comic Sans on some of our web pages. If that membership form becomes more effective when rendered with Comic Sans then do design ideals fly out of the window?

Well, maybe – but as the article points out – there’s more than one informal font in the world, so perhaps Comic Sans isn’t always the answer.