Collaborating to Craft Delightful Information Designs
Where design and data meet, so should delight
What makes something delightful?
Why focus on crafting delightful information designs?
Information designs are special creatures in our digital world. However, they are only as relevant as the data they represent. As time passes, it’s easy for them to slip into oblivion due to the data losing relevance. You could even ask, do data visualizations or data-driven applications ever endure past their prime?
I would argue that for truly delightful information designs, time does not render them archaic. Instead, they find their place in future practitioners’ and lifelong learners’ bookmarks as experiences to revisit, and exist as tangible records of how they expanded knowledge transfer in unique ways.
Designing for delight gives data oxygen
Data is dynamic by nature, and dynamic data is the order of the day. It is part of what breathes life into what is otherwise easily disposable and forgettable.
Visualizations, interfaces and applications remain strong vessels of a message when they are designed well around the changing data they host. For maximum exchange value a data visualization must be accessible, navigable, and shareable in order to endure the revolving door of information cycles and a peaking attention economy.
Design that rises to the challenge of making data not only useful but delightful adds the oxygen that keeps our favorite interactive media alive.
However, delight is a tricky element to pin down and craft into each of our designs. Sure — we know how to access high quality content and data, research ways to visually encode and decode information based on cognitive science, and draw up informed information architecture strategies that boost performance. But a well-built artifact does not mean it breathes, much less takes on a life of its own.
Delight has no tangible benchmark to optimize toward. Crafting delight asks if we ourselves recognize, know, and foster delight. It requires us to build in perception cues for all people that might encounter our designs. It asks us not only to survey others in the production process, but to build in what others would design themselves.
The result? Ideally a simplified version of the original intention. In no way watered down, but refined into an essential form and delivered to the audience as an experience. An experience that can be appreciated by many over time.
Challenge: how do you start bringing together that multiplicity of minds?
Encouraging collaboration between designers and data scientists
Ideas can always be found in the gaps between designers and data scientists on a team, or by exploring tension between the design and data scientist minds of an individual creator.
At a meetup consisting mostly of data scientists (analysts, architects, engineers), and lighter on the design side, I was reminded about the importance of engaging designers with data scientists, especially in product development.
When designers and data scientists engage infrequently, designers don’t get to learn about the complexities behind the data they are showcasing, which should be at the heart of their designs. Meanwhile, data scientists don’t receive opportunities to appreciate how the information they work so hard to gather and organize can result in a seamless experience for the end user.
When the two sides come together to grapple with the subtleties of how data collection strategies change and evolve, the end result will benefit. They can design something enduring, that doesn’t break or fail to meet basic navigation needs when the data inevitably grows in scale and complexity.
Workshopping for delight
Suspending our inner critic
One way to encourage minds to engage in a different mode of thinking is through gamification. By creating space for a game to take place, we can temporarily create new rules that suspend typical obstacles, for example:
- Everyone is creative (suspending the idea that “I am not creative”)
- Everyone can design (suspending the concept of ‘designer’ as a role vs. state of mind)
- Random chance determines final results (suspending the idea that there are others more talented and more creative that will probably come up with the best results)
Setting our goal and purpose
To test these ideas out I led an interactive workshop at a New York meetup for Women in Data. We focused on creating handcrafted designs like data badges, and discussed the beauty of many stunning, thought-provoking data visualizations (such as Valentina D’Efilippo’s Poppy Field). Both prompted us to look at information in new ways.
The challenge in designing compelling artifacts requires both designers and data scientists to continually look at presenting information with refreshed perspectives.
The Game: Metaphor meets Dataset
We used a game to explore how interesting connections between information and modes of representation can be made.
- First, we divided the group into “Datasets” and “Visual Metaphors.”
- For five minutes, those in the group “Visual Metaphors” silently generated a shortlist of visual metaphors and identified examples of associated visual properties.
- Those in the group “Datasets” were handed thematic dataset prompts and brainstormed a list of relevant data types and variables.
- The groups mingled for the next 15 minutes, finding partners they could collaborate with to visually encode information.
- Then they sketched out concepts around how specific variables might map to the visual properties of their chosen metaphor.
- Finally, we came together as a group for a “gallery walk” of all the concepts. Each sketch was presented and received reactions and feedback from the group.
Results
Some of the designs that came out of serendipitous encounters between datasets and visual metaphors are recreated here:
Natural disaster metaphor meets economy (quantitative) data:
Animal metaphor meets artwork (image) data:
Food metaphor meets history (text) data:
Collaboration leads to unexpected ideas
While not all results of the interactive workshop are readily intuitive, they were each delightful entry points into a story. They were memorable, remarkable, and amusing if not thought-provoking to the group. Essential ingredients to a delightful design of information.
By using a structured inspiration process to communicate important information stories, we built in a layer of humanization. We built in the desire to organize, present and consume information in continuously fresh, relatable, surprising ways. And maybe, the key to crafting memorable information designs is that simple: Bring people who think differently together. Focus on understanding someone different, and work on ideas that delight you both. Break down the unhelpful resistance found in our inner critic by suspending egos, and let the stories itching to be heard and remembered shine through.
