We humans are a visual bunch of creatures. That is why there are more people watching TV than reading books. Even at an early age, most find it easier to distinguish colors than musical tones. Most children find it more difficult to identify a given note than a given color.
Anyway, how do we take advantage of our visual prowess in understanding and interpreting complex information? Simple. We just have to make the complex information visual.
You may say that this is not new. We already have graphs and charts that simplify the interpretation of numeric data. But what I am saying is something more complex than complex numeric data. Graphs and charts are getting old, you know.
We also currently use visualization techniques not only to understand data but also to perform actions. Think of dragging a file to the recycle bin or the trash in order to delete it instead of typing rm -i <filename> at the command prompt. But again, that is as exciting as watching paint dry and does not make our hearts race, does it?
What about seeing a bug in your screen if you are infected by a virus? What about an anti-virus that looks like a bug swatter to get rid of that virus? What about having visual access to files being “eaten up” by the virus?
The same could also be applied in the field of information security where you need to analyze a lot of complex data and log files. If you do this manually, the intruder will be long gone and has covered his tracks before you figure things out. Imagine if you can be visually informed of an attack when it is taking place and can track the intruder with visual tools. It will be fun and gratifying to graphically kick him or her out of your system.
Well, these are just musings of a writer whose imagination went wild. But then again, wouldn’t that be interesting?
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Sure it will be fun!
ReplyDeleteWhat about if we have large files we make them big!
small files smallers
older files have a spidernet on them or some visual dust..
this is real life why don't we have to make it boring when it comes to digital?
tracking the intruder or basically any application and what is doing "visually" this way we can track down the bad apps from their behavior ..
how about having a new window that shows this visualization
"Simple. We just have to make the complex information visual."
The Back of the Napkin book helps you to convert business problems into pictures ... you should read it
It would be really interesting...
@Hussein,
ReplyDeleteI must say that your ideas are brilliant. Imagine for example the file size — icon size thing you mentioned. You can immediately compare two files at a glance instead of going through the numbers in your head which is a bit cumbersome specially if the difference is not large.