[instaviz-users] The final push

[Glen Low]

Richard

On 21/11/2008, at 12:46 AM, Richard Stahlhut wrote:

> on the other hand, maybe I just don't get it.
>
> someone, please describe a workflow where it really makes sense to
> rapidly graph on the tiny iphone screen -- rather than scribble onto
> paper and then do it later in graphviz or some other tool.   At this
> point, I don't really understand the market for the current version --
> slick, though it is.

Screen size doesn't matter as much as we think, provided we have the  
aforementioned slick interface.

Why? I saw this written on joelonsoftware: the human eye is really  
just a virtual memory paged device. We don't image all 5 zillions  
pixels of our beautiful 40" plasma screen TV at once in our retinas,  
instead we only really see in detail using the small fovea region.  
When our attention and eye flicks to some other aspect of our  
environment, the existing small scene is paged out and the new scene  
is paged in, and our consciousness stitches all of that into our  
picture of the world. The essential part of this illusion is this: the  
paging activity, the shifting of the eye to somewhere else, must be as  
subconscious or unconscious as possible. Also, it must be possible to  
make sense of the world at low resolution before you focus on the  
details.

So it boils down to how seamless, or in your words, how "slick" the  
interface is. I'd contend that even a desktop window with scroll bars  
and a mouse to control them isn't slick enough, because our attention  
has to refocus on the chrome and sketching with a mouse is like  
sketching with a bar of soap. But the iPhone interface with little or  
no chrome and using the high bandwidth interface of your own fingers,  
could very well be.

I sat down and played with Safari the first few days I had my iPhone.  
Obviously the whole experience pales in comparison to Safari on the  
Mac, I found myself either squinting at tiny text or reading too fast  
for the text size I had zoomed out to. But after a while I found my  
conscious resistance to the metaphor receding and my brain expanding  
into the interface. (No drugs were involved, except caffeine.) What  
spoiled the illusion really is that zooming in Safari, especially in  
1.0, sometimes took a couple more fractions of a second than I  
expected. That and interacting with the non-browsing parts of the  
interface, like the search and address bar and the bookmarks.

Instaviz has several things going for it here. I don't expect people  
to enter copious amounts of text, nor do I expect to see giant 1,000- 
node structures created -- but once your baby is out in the wild  
world, who knows what it will grow into? Still, graphs are primarily  
visual rather than textual, and at large zoom-outs it's enough for the  
human brain to grok the rough shapes and connections of nodes, vs.  
having to parse tiny bits of text for meaning. That's why being a  
performance freak pays off for Instaviz... the scrolling and the  
zooming has to be so quick you don't consciously think about it any  
more, and all the better if there's only one mode to do everything in  
(I'm thinking of for example Sketches which forces you to switch modes  
to zooming mode to zoom in and out, primarily because supporting  
scrolling and sketching in the same mode is so hard).

I struggled more with iPhone Notes, trying to see if it was a useful  
brainstorming or notetaking tool. Did I fuss too much seeing whether  
my key strokes were recognized or the word corrector substituted the  
right word, or could I relax and just take notes? So this is where I  
put my locus of worry about whether Instaviz will succeed or fail --  
how well text entry works on the iPhone, how well text entry works in  
Instaviz. Again, most of the graphs I've seen, whether sketched on  
white board and napkin, or on the computer, don't have long tracts of  
texts as nodes.

Thanks for your thoughts, and I'm glad the world (and this mailing  
list) has room for more than one opinion.


Cheers, Glen Low


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