UX London Tweets – Jeff Veen

Here is a dump of my live tweets during Jeff’s presentation at UX London. I’m writing a more coherent version of this for Johnny Holland – coming soon!

  • @veen talking about designing our way through data
  • @veen things that happened in 1974 (meta = hippy goes mainstream). A v important year for the internet #uxlondon (also the year i was born)
  • a tiny little 6yr old epiphany for @veen in 1974 when he first saw Pong – ooh, I can control what’s on the screen!
  • tools for participation lots of capacity to store data = some pretty cool effects
  • there are 24hrs of video uploaded every 8 seconds on YouTube.
  • as a designer I can look into the data and see if there is something in there I can use to inform the design (eg. the colour)
  • I’ve taken the story out of the data and shown it by applying design elements
  • ‘decorating’ data rather than using design to provide better access is dangerous. @veen
  • Google Analytics interface inspired by Indiana Jones @veen
  • use visualisation to change behaviour (statistics can be anesthetizing, hard to make meaning)
  • find the story in the data, assign different visual queues to each dimension, remove everything that isn’t telling the story
  • mini theme from #uxlondon – don’t be a control freak
  • think more about giving yr audience tools so they can find their own patterns & stories, rather than controlling their experience
  • shout out to Dopplr at
  • provide filters to enable clarity (helping people make sense of data) @veen
  • Storytelling using data visualisation is incredibly compelling Now we need to give people tools so they can find their own stories
  • @veen tshirt: ‘Math is Easy, Design is Hard’. Not a popular tshirt at Google.
  • research is great but it’s just data that you use to inform your design. Data doesn’t tell you how to design. shoutout to @stop
  • @veen quotes @zeldman: ‘start with the user, but know yourself’. Thinks this should be inverted
  • ‘The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.’ Richard Hamming, 1962 #uxlondon (via @ritchielee)