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Also, amusingly, you referenced Tufte as designing an airplane cockpit -- looks pretty similar to the dashboard being lampooned in this blog post.

• potatolicious 15y ago
  Only in the most superficial of ways. If your definition of "looks pretty similar" is "using widgets shaped in similar ways", then, well, I guess I'd have to hand it to you. The USPTO has built its dashboard around familiar looking instruments - ones that work in many other contexts (airplanes, cars, etc), but is completely inappropriate in their usage. A dial in a cockpit is not a trivially designed instrument - it provides valuable context to the operator that simply hasn't been replicated in the USPTO dashboard. The rate at which a needle moves gives valuable feedback as to the rate of change of value - the needles on the USPTO page doesn't even move. Similarly, a dial can be a valuable glimpse at the current quantity in relation to the whole (e.g., a tachometer, or a fuel gauge), but few of the dials on the USPTO dashboard have this relevance. In other words, the entire point of the original post lampooning this dashboard is that they chose ways to represent the information that's pretty, but entirely inappropriate for the data they're trying to communicate, which not only makes it useless, but misleading as well. You drawing this comparison to the airplane cockpit (a comparatively well-designed, well-thought out interface that does use appropriate representations for information) really completely misses the point.