I had the fortune of attending one of Edward Tufte’s one-day seminars in Boston last week. His seminars have become something of a pilgrimage for the data-minded, and whether or not you agree with everything he preaches, there is no questioning the influence he’s had on the science and art that has come to be known as Data Visualization. Tufte has got his presentation down to a science, and even works in some great one-liners (only the software and drug businesses call their customers “users,” and in both cases those users are really only there for one thing – the content).

The course was a full day event, and while not all of it was salient to UI/UX design, he did spend a fair amount of time highlighting some design heuristics that I think apply to what we at ExtensionEngine do for every project.

1. Information is the Interface. When designing for either web or mobile, often the easiest thing to do is to layer on lots of pretty graphics and animations, even if that means you end up “burying the lead” for the user. Especially in cases where you have lots of good data or information to present, design should be the enabler, not the end goal. Tufte cited the fact that corporate websites and presentations often have data broken up across 10 different pages or 10 different slides, making it a chore to consume all of that data at once and make the comparisons our brains want to make. A good counterexample is the sports section – millions of people can look at a table on ESPN.com that might have 10 columns and 30 rows, and not feel overwhelmed. Let the information itself be the interface, and let your users process the data on their own terms.

2. Pick your battles. When everything on a page is emphasized, then effectively nothing is; you’ve just increased the noise level. When you’re designing a homepage, if you highlight and put nice graphics around every page element, it will be difficult for the users to know what they’re supposed to read first, or how they’re supposed to follow your call to action. Instead, draw the users’ eyes to your tagline and the sign-up button. If they really want to get to your Management Background page, they’ll get there on their own.

3. 1+1=3. Two pieces of data means you have one piece of data, a second piece of data, AND the relationship or the space between the two. One of biggest ongoing UI challenges is presenting complex information in an easily digestible manner. When attempting to do so, it’s important to keep in mind not just the individual data points on which you’re reporting, but the relationship between them as well. So in practice, if you’re presenting data on heart disease, and you put the “patient age” and “rate of heart disease” columns next to each other, be aware of the effect that will have on the conclusions your users may draw.

4. Look to maps as the shining example of effective design. Maps are one of the first user interfaces, and are probably the most widely recognized. And generally speaking, maps have got it right. A map of the world can convey thousands of pieces of data, but it’s also easy for any one “user” to find the one piece of data that is most relevant to him. When you look at a map, you know that the lines drawn on it demarcate the boundaries between countries; words with the biggest font represent countries, smaller fonts stand for cities; rivers are blue and mountains are brown (and the little italicizes number is the height; a simple legend tells us how far one map-inch really is.

5. Don’t go bragging about your big swinging terabytes just yet. Designing for “big data” is a real challenge. Doing the same for “lots of data” can be easy – make sure you know the difference. If you’ve taken ten million measurements, it might seem like you have a lot of data, but if you’re just capturing the same variable over and over, you really just have one piece of data. If you’re trying to solve a bank robbery, two cameras trained on exactly the same place won’t give you 2x the number of observations. You need multivariate data – two cameras trained at different angles, plus a sound recording, plus a log of bank activity over the last week, plus some fingerprints – now you’re getting closer to “big data.”

The Internet has profoundly changed our perceptions about a number of things, not least the concept of time. But has it sufficiently changed businesses’ perceptions of its consumers?

Take a simple thing as a website’s look and feel, and consider what it evokes in your users.

People, obviously, have different expectations. Still, most of us think we can gauge user expectations to some measure…the proverbial ‘focus group of one.’ But what we may not recognize is the dynamic nature of these expectations, and the rapidity with which they change over time. Consequently, it is critical that businesses recognize this fundamental dynamic and do so in, shall we say, Internet time.

One of my favorite anecdotes to bring home this point concerns a client of ours. The client offers products and services in the student / educational space and is probably more vulnerable than others because a large proportion of its users are so-called “digital natives” whose online behavior changes faster than most. When we began our “Discovery” process, the company was solidly skeptical about the need to spend money and time on a UX upgrade.

But you would be surprised how quickly the client changed their mind — based on some end-user feedback. Here is the gist of what that student said in a videotaped focus group of the company’s then website:

“It looks dated, old and stuffy…I fear the content might be old as well.”

Such a perception — even if it weren’t true — could be a deathblow to any company. Our client recognized that the perception was real, even if it wasn’t true that its content was not updated. To its credit, it was instantly persuaded, admitting that it hadn’t realized how much impact the look and the feel of a website has on the end user.

What is striking in that user feedback is the intuitive connection users make between a site’s look-and-feel and its content. In the Internet era, old wine in a new bottle is, perhaps, better than old wine in old bottle. Of course, the link between design and content is not the only finding that impacts users. Let me share a few other bits of user feedback on our client’s website that are quite remarkable for what it tells us about user expectations.

“Classy elegant streamlined logo but the rest of it looks like back end search. Definitely be more attractive as a web app.”

“Would like to choose sources to search.”

“I wish I could drag and re-order saved content/searches.”

“If there was a way to work with a team that would be helpful. Like Google Apps’ ability to share.”

The key thing to understand is this:

Users “interact” with any site, and its contents in myriad ways. What’s more, this process itself rapidly changes with technology.

Take, for example, the simple process of search, which has undergone dramatic changes even within the universe of Google. Different users interact differently with different search engines, or when using search features on websites. As is evident from the reactions above, users come to expect many other features seen in other sites. Consequently, businesses need to stay tuned with their users, periodically assess their changing needs and nimbly deliver on their expectations as they evolve.

Our “Discovery” process is geared to do just that and more. In this phase, we gather key information and data, and assess user experience/interface in order to formulate a sound strategy that will, among other things, provide a personalized web experience to users, extend the brand, increase market share, evaluate expansion opportunities and reposition the company to support future growth plans.

Once this preliminary evaluation is completed, extensionEngine’s team will outline a strategy that best fits the client’s need before collaborating in defining the scope of the project, its schedule and budget for development. We believe this will ensure that you will serve new wine in new bottles but at the very least be able to serve old wine in new bottle.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett’s $10.7 billion investment in IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) has taken the tech world, as much as Wall Street, by surprise. What is one to make of an investor, arguably the world’s most famous, who never placed a pretty penny on tech stocks, not even during the Internet boom, now making his largest quarterly commitment of cash in 15 years on a single technology company?

In the hullabaloo about Berkshire Hathaway’s huge investment in IBM, many may have missed the fact that Buffett also placed a smaller bet on Intel ($232 million), too.

Buffett’s fabled investment strategy has been built on a few principles that he believes will always remain inviolable. With regard to tech stocks, it was encapsulated in his annual letter to shareholders amid an Internet-led tech boom in 1998: “Technology is just something we don’t understand, so we don’t invest in it.”

Clearly, that has changed. When announcing his huge investment, Buffett told CNBC: IBM “fits all my principles…it’s something we expect to own indefinitely.”

So, if Buffett has not really tweaked any of his stringent investment principles, we would have to believe that IBM has dramatically transformed itself to fulfill Berkshire Hathaway’s valued standards.

What really has happened at IBM?

Oldtimers will barely recognize Big Blue today. It has shed nearly all of its hardware business – only 1.6% of its revenues come from sale of servers and computers. After a strategic shift that started over a decade ago under Lou Gerstner Jr., IBM is today a software and technology and business consulting services behemoth.

Two things are crucial here.

One, IBM’s financials have vastly improved on account of far higher margins on software and services, and extraordinary execution. So much so, some analysts are calling IBM a “classic Buffett stock.”

Two, in its strategic transformation, the 100-year-old company is looking like a perpetual business machine that is never likely to go out of fashion or business, no matter what new technology or computer might emerge in the future.

Of the two, it is the latter that finally swung Buffett. Remember he is an investor who likes candy, paint, insurance and finance – things that everybody loves or needs, no matter the circumstance. Buffett likes things that seem perpetual, which is why he then holds stocks of these companies indefinitely.

“I don’t know any large company that has been so specific about what they want to do,” said Buffett. “I felt that IBM had a very good business.”

It is clear that Buffett, finally, believes IT services will be a bedrock of business, and that no business can be run without quality computers and software. In this realm, IBM is supreme with its innovative focus on business solutions, a strategy that Wharton marketing professor George S. Day says “is sound and hard to copy.”

Even though IBM’s transformation may have finally endeared it to Buffett, the fabled investor’s final embrace of technology still is a recognition that IT firms play a crucial role in powering business and will likely do so for the foreseeable future.

And that is a view that we at extensionEngine share with Mr. Buffett.