Day: November 26, 2003

A bit slow, but interesting: Search Engine Decoder. [via Emergic]

I just reviewed an illuminating re-think of mapping the California recall votes, thanks to a pointer from Jeffrey Veen. Wow. You can really lie better with pictures than numbers, if you want to. I visited the Exploratorium here in San Francisco yesterday, and smiled my way through various hands-on and eyes-on exhibits, several of which pointed out the way our expectations color (literally and otherwise) our vision. I currently have EarthDesk set to display the Miller projection on the desktop map of the world, so I’m aware of some of the tradeoffs in displaying information, but this look at the recall vote, and the ways in which lazy choices can influence the understanding of information is dramatic. I don’t have the skills or the tools to experiment in this field, but fascinating all the same.

Just read this IBM developerWorks article about the poor state of documentation. Fair enough, but whining about it without providing more specific examples, for real-world products, isn’t tremendously helpful. (I rarely write documentation, but I have done some for internal tools.) The only tip to improve the process was on indexing.

Want to make a good index? Ask people to look things up in it, but require them to write down the words they think of before they look in the index. Now make sure all those words are in your index. You’ll be stunned at the gaps this uncovers.