Nonsensor.

I find Thomas Baekdal at baekdal.com to be an interesting read whenever I manage to get through some feeds. His recent article "Stop making it look like a system" struck a particular chord. Anyone interested in doing interfaces for any kind of software – web or otherwise – would do well to take a look at that. It's basically what my entire job was during the design of Blogsmith.

He does a great job clarifying and quantifying a process that we ourselves didn't describe with a whole ton of sophistication: Gavin is fond of saying "this looks like a programmer did it." It's easy to spit out tables stocked with data, the barely formatted result of a database query. It's not as easy to turn those into human-friendly formats. We were fortunate enough to have the "real" data Baekdal talks about in his article, so we knew what we were working with. But more importantly, I have been fortunate enough to have a team that won't accept these "system" style screens.

How now?

It's not easy. Not in the least. It requires a lot of thought before you even get to the whiteboard, but there are two big things I like to try:

1. Imagine turning it sideways. It seems dumb, and actually turning a table sideways gives you the same crappy table on its side. But it gets you thinking in a different direction.
2. Take out the table headings and try to convey that information without those keys. This seems overly fundamental to what I'm saying here, but I guess that's the catch: you can't get out of this paradigm unless you can explain your data without explaining it. Grouping, weighting, and maybe a contextual word or two – like a well placed "at" or "and" – will go a long way toward making something easier to understand.

I was going to put some before-and-after screenshots in here, and maybe I still will, but I'm debating, considering the proprietary nature of Blogsmith.