Background textures of work An Article by Lucy Keer lucykeer.com One thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it. ...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun. workproductivitymaking
The Eyes Have It A Research Paper by Ben Shneiderman www.cs.umd.edu The Visual Information Seeking Mantra visualizationinformationdata
The Visual Information Seeking Mantra There are many visual design guidelines but the basic principle might be summarized as the Visual Information Seeking Mantra: Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand Each line represents one project in which I found myself rediscovering this principle and therefore wrote it down it as a reminder. It proved to be only a starting point in trying to characterize the multiple information visualization innovations occurring at university, government, and industry research labs. visualizationinformation