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I disagree with this article, and agree with the reviewer. The application is not useful at all, and what could have been an excellent UI, given a little more t

I disagree with this article, and agree with the reviewer. The application is not useful at all, and what could have been an excellent UI, given a little more thought and power, is unfortunately just lipstick. Tracks and artists are grouped in 3D space by name alone, and their arrangement and spacing is meaningless. This makes the app a pretty, but useless skin of a simple playlist. I think the design lends itself to music discovery, not playback. Hooked up to rdio or Spotify, this could be a fun way of exploring new music by proximity. Like this song? Here's 5 other similar artists nearby. To me this speaks volumes about data visualisation. Done incorrectly, it's useless. Useful and simple will hopefully win over beautiful but impractical. You can't start with beautiful and add useful later.

ENOTTY 15y ago
To build on your comment (which I think is spot on), we've mostly seen data visualization used to build interfaces designed to discover new things from data. Data visualization (currently) seems to be about letting the brain do what it does best and discern patterns from a bunch of data. But when we get into common tasks that have memorized workflows, visualizations might be too clunky of a way to work at it. For any given task, we all have learned a certain workflow that meets our needs in terms of efficiency, complication, and power. These goals aren't always the same goals as a visualization.
Silhouette 15y ago
> To me this speaks volumes about data visualisation. Done incorrectly, it's useless. I think it's worse than that: poor visualisations are counterproductive. Visualisation techniques are practically valuable when they let the user understand something that would not otherwise be clear. For example, a tool might analyse a complex data set and use a visualisation that highlights facts that are relevant to answering a particular question. In this case, I don't see what the visualisation tells us that simple tabular playlists don't. It doesn't appear that any use is being made of the extra visual degrees of freedom offered by the astronomical metaphor, and extra visual degrees of freedom (spacial relationships, colours, sizes, shapes...) are usually what makes a good visualisation technique effective.
- dmlorenzetti 15y ago
  In this case, I don't see what the visualisation tells us that simple tabular playlists don't. To extend your theme with an example-- with a tabular interface, one could sort by song title, in order to listen to covers of a favorite tune. This star-planet-moon interface apparently locks the viewer into sorting only by artist, then by album. That, even more than the wasted opportunity, makes it actively counterproductive.

ENOTTY 15y ago

To build on your comment (which I think is spot on), we've mostly seen data visualization used to build interfaces designed to discover new things from data. Data visualization (currently) seems to be about letting the brain do what it does best and discern patterns from a bunch of data. But when we get into common tasks that have memorized workflows, visualizations might be too clunky of a way to work at it. For any given task, we all have learned a certain workflow that meets our needs in terms of efficiency, complication, and power. These goals aren't always the same goals as a visualization.

Silhouette 15y ago

> To me this speaks volumes about data visualisation. Done incorrectly, it's useless. I think it's worse than that: poor visualisations are counterproductive. Visualisation techniques are practically valuable when they let the user understand something that would not otherwise be clear. For example, a tool might analyse a complex data set and use a visualisation that highlights facts that are relevant to answering a particular question. In this case, I don't see what the visualisation tells us that simple tabular playlists don't. It doesn't appear that any use is being made of the extra visual degrees of freedom offered by the astronomical metaphor, and extra visual degrees of freedom (spacial relationships, colours, sizes, shapes...) are usually what makes a good visualisation technique effective.

dmlorenzetti 15y ago
In this case, I don't see what the visualisation tells us that simple tabular playlists don't. To extend your theme with an example-- with a tabular interface, one could sort by song title, in order to listen to covers of a favorite tune. This star-planet-moon interface apparently locks the viewer into sorting only by artist, then by album. That, even more than the wasted opportunity, makes it actively counterproductive.