I’m happy to help spread word about an interesting new FREE ebook that has been published on the excellent, long-running ‘Interaction Design Foundation‘ website. The book is titled ‘Bringing Numbers to Life: LAVA and Design-Led Innovation in Visual Analytics‘ and is authored by John Armitage, a strategic digital product designer and practice leader.
Spread across 26 chapters, with full-color and detailed examples, access to videos, animations, documents, and design artifacts, this deeply researched study presents the “context, process, and results of a multi-year investigation, at business software giant SAP, into how computing technology can better enable people to discover and make sense out of the numbers that impact them”.
The evolving digital landscape is changing how we interact with numbers in our work and personal lives. The Internet, unprecedented data creation & access, accelerating computing power, dynamic digital displays, social networks, and mobile content consumption are enabling breakthroughs in how quantitative data is presented, manipulated, and acted upon. In parallel, the Design Thinking movement is popularizing innovation methods long known by designers, allowing us to challenge deep-seated conventions of how the built world appears and behaves.
Having been slightly critical of SAP’s somewhat (in my view) overwhelming repertoire of different visualisation and analytics-related products, I think this book offers a fascinating peek behind the scenes into a real-world big business context of visual analytics, something that many of us in the field are often seeking to learn more about.
