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Visual design has long been looked at by many of those in business as a coat of paint to be applied to a finished product to help it sell. In this world view design takes a back seat to advertising and its significance as a discipline is reduced.

This is (thankfully) starting to change, largely due to the universal recognition of the importance of User Interface design. Still, design remains a poorly understood and difficult process for most companies. So much so that good UI design can actually be used as an indicator of a company’s health. This was shown rather effectively by Teehan + Lax and their UX fund.

This is because of two things. The first is that good design, particularly good UI design creates a more attractive, easier to use product. Such a product will sell better than something unattractive and difficult to use. The second is that Design is hard. Design is particularly hard for dysfunctional groups or groups made up of individuals with competing visions or interests.

The execution of a well designed product can be seen as a sign or corporate health in that it is the end result of a series of interactions between very complex systems of needs. Only a well managed organization can sort out these complex systems properly. It is a miracle it happens at all.

So the next time you have a particularly easy and rewarding interaction with a well designed product, think not just of the designers, but also of the executives who had the good sense to pay for quality and the presence of mind not to ruin it.

I have an art and design background. One of the key ideas in art (and design) is negative space. Negative space is the area of a drawing or sculpture or whatever that is not the subject. In the illustration bellow The negative space is everything that is not the flowers the vase or the table.

160k in art school education deployed here.

The importance of negative space in establishing things like scale becomes clear when you compare the A and B images. The negative space creates the context for the flowers, and the context in turn helps the viewer infer certain things about the flowers.

The same thing can be true when visualizing data. Placing data sets onto maps creates context around the data. The context allows us to see relationships. Similarly creating a visual timeline out of a list of events (or data points) lets us see better how those events relate by showing us the space between them. FreeTime uses a fixed contextual framework (time) to combine very different data sets. It is this context that allows FreeTime to transform data into information.

We have a design philosophy here at Graphient. It’s actually encoded right into our mission statement. The relevant bit is the part about making tools simple enough for any user but powerful enough for business and science. We’re making a tool that does very complex, powerful things and it needs to appear to the casual user that it does them in a very simple and straightforward way. At the same time, if someone puts the effort in to learn our software, complexity and depth should be revealed to him or her proportionally to their understanding of the tool.

After going through a lot of different metaphors in seeking to explain this philosophy to people outside the company I have settled on this: The ideal user interface is like a kiddy pool that is a mile deep. Anyone one should be able to jump in and paddle around, but an experienced user should be able to dive deep in.

I would say that FreeTime, our first product comes close to this ideal. We’re still going to have to include some set up assistants to help people along initially. To push our metaphor a little too far, these will be like flotation devices for novice swimmers.

More on that as it develops.