Designing With Data

Amazon, Netflix, Google and Facebook have all used data-driven design techniques to improve the user experience of their consumer products. With this book, you'll learn how improve your design decisions through data-driven A/B testing and how you can apply this process to everything from small design tweaks to large-scale UX concepts.

Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords? In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications. Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn how to use and operate them more effectively Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures

Data visualization is an efficient and effective medium for communicating large amounts of information, but the design process can often seem like an unexplainable creative endeavor. This concise book aims to demystify the design process by showing you how to use a linear decision-making process to encode your information visually. Delve into different kinds of visualization, including infographics and visual art, and explore the influences at work in each one. Then learn how to apply these concepts to your design process. Learn data visualization classifications, including explanatory, exploratory, and hybrid Discover how three fundamental influences—the designer, the reader, and the data—shape what you create Learn how to describe the specific goal of your visualization and identify the supporting data Decide the spatial position of your visual entities with axes Encode the various dimensions of your data with appropriate visual properties, such as shape and color See visualization best practices and suggestions for encoding various specific data types

An integrated introduction to data visualization, strategic communication, and delivery best practices. Persuading with Data provides an integrated instructional guide to data visualization, strategic communication, and delivery best practices. Most books on data visualization focus on creating good graphs. This is the first book that combines both explanatory visualization and communication strategy, showing how to use visuals to create effective communications that convince an audience to accept and act on the data. In four parts that proceed from micro to macro, the book explains how our brains make sense of graphs; how to design effective graphs and slides that support your ideas; how to organize those ideas into a compelling presentation; and how to deliver and defend data to an audience. Persuading with Data is for anyone who has to explain analytical results to others. It synthesizes a wide range of skills needed by modern data professionals, providing a complete toolkit for creating effective business communications. Readers will learn how to simplify in order to amplify, how to communicate data analysis, how to prepare for audience resistance, and much more. The book integrates practitioner and academic perspectives with real-world examples from a variety of industries, organizations, and disciplines. It is accessible to a wide range of readers—from undergraduates to mid-career and executive-level professionals—and has been tested in settings that include academic classes and workplace training sessions.

Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to: Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data—Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!

Author Scott Murray teaches you the fundamental concepts and methods of D3, a JavaScript library that lets you express data visually in a web browser

“In this comprehensive book, Professor Randy Deutsch has unlocked and laid bare the twenty-first century codice nascosto of architecture. It is data. Big data. Data as driver. . .This book offers us the chance to become informed and knowledgeable pursuers of data and the opportunities it offers to making architecture a wonderful, useful, and smart art form.” —From the Foreword by James Timberlake, FAIA Written for architects, engineers, contractors, owners, and educators, and based on today’s technology and practices, Data-Driven Design and Construction: 25 Strategies for Capturing, Applying and Analyzing Building Data addresses how innovative individuals and firms are using data to remain competitive while advancing their practices. seeks to address and rectify a gap in our learning, by explaining to architects, engineers, contractors and owners—and students of these fields—how to acquire and use data to make more informed decisions. documents how data-driven design is the new frontier of the convergence between BIM and architectural computational analyses and associated tools. is a book of adaptable strategies you and your organization can apply today to make the most of the data you have at your fingertips. Data-Driven Design and Construction was written to help design practitioners and their project teams make better use of BIM, and leverage data throughout the building lifecycle.

Centralized data warehouses, the long-time defacto standard for housing data for analytics, are rapidly giving way to multi-faceted cloud data platforms. Companies that embrace modern cloud data platforms benefit from an integrated view of their business using all of their data and can take advantage of advanced analytic practices to drive predictions and as yet unimagined data services. Designing Cloud Data Platforms is an hands-on guide to envisioning and designing a modern scalable data platform that takes full advantage of the flexibility of the cloud. As you read, you''ll learn the core components of a cloud data platform design, along with the role of key technologies like Spark and Kafka Streams. You''ll also explore setting up processes to manage cloud-based data, keep it secure, and using advanced analytic and BI tools to analyse it. about the technology Access to affordable, dependable, serverless cloud services has revolutionized the way organizations can approach data management, and companies both big and small are raring to migrate to the cloud. But without a properly designed data platform, data in the cloud can remain just as siloed and inaccessible as it is today for most organizations. Designing Cloud Data Platforms lays out the principles of a well-designed platform that uses the scalable resources of the public cloud to manage all of an organization''s data, and present it as useful business insights. about the book In Designing Cloud Data Platforms, you''ll learn how to integrate data from multiple sources into a single, cloud-based, modern data platform. Drawing on their real-world experiences designing cloud data platforms for dozens of organizations, cloud data experts Danil Zburivsky and Lynda Partner take you through a six-layer approach to creating cloud data platforms that maximizes flexibility and manageability and reduces costs. Starting with foundational principles, you''ll learn how to get data into your platform from different databases, files, and APIs, the essential practices for organizing and processing that raw data, and how to best take advantage of the services offered by major cloud vendors. As you progress past the basics you''ll take a deep dive into advanced topics to get the most out of your data platform, including real-time data management, machine learning analytics, schema management, and more. what''s inside The tools of different public cloud for implementing data platforms Best practices for managing structured and unstructured data sets Machine learning tools that can be used on top of the cloud Cost optimization techniques about the reader For data professionals familiar with the basics of cloud computing and distributed data processing systems like Hadoop and Spark. about the authors Danil Zburivsky has over 10 years experience designing and supporting large-scale data infrastructure for enterprises across the globe. Lynda Partner is the VP of Analytics-as-a-Service at Pythian, and has been on the business side of data for over 20 years.

Interaction design that entails a qualitative shift from a symbolic, language-oriented stance to an experiential stance that encompasses the entire design and use cycle. With the rise of ubiquitous technology, data-driven design, and the Internet of Things, our interactions and interfaces with technology are about to change dramatically, incorporating such emerging technologies as shape-changing interfaces, wearables, and movement-tracking apps. A successful interactive tool will allow the user to engage in a smooth, embodied, interaction, creating an intimate correspondence between users' actions and system response. And yet, as Kristina Höök points out, current design methods emphasize symbolic, language-oriented, and predominantly visual interactions. In Designing with the Body, Höök proposes a qualitative shift in interaction design to an experiential, felt, aesthetic stance that encompasses the entire design and use cycle. Höök calls this new approach soma design; it is a process that reincorporates body and movement into a design regime that has long privileged language and logic. Soma design offers an alternative to the aggressive, rapid design processes that dominate commercial interaction design; it allows (and requires) a slow, thoughtful process that takes into account fundamental human values. She argues that this new approach will yield better products and create healthier, more sustainable companies. Höök outlines the theory underlying soma design and describes motivations, methods, and tools. She offers examples of soma design “encounters” and an account of her own design process. She concludes with “A Soma Design Manifesto,” which challenges interaction designers to “restart” their field—to focus on bodies and perception rather than reasoning and intellect.