iPhone was beautiful. It wasn’t the first phone ever, but through its splendour ness, human got more and more idea how to explore and utilise technology out of a cellphone. Something that other prodigy such as Nokia nor Ericsson couldn’t see few years ago.

In the case of software, it is very important to beautifully craft things so it will bring more added value to us — humans, as the user. One of the way is through interactive data visualisations.

In the era where Data is called “The New Oil”, human explore and find new insights based on available data in various sector. The world tried to automate everything, and also put “intelligence” onto machine. However, machine at the moment is similar to 3–4 years old child. Human teach them. Machine has its limited capabilities no matter what sales people says about how intelligent their product is. Machines still need human to train them, and let them become smarter.

Now, the problem is, human currently live in such a dynamic world where every single thing move very fast. Human need new ways to learn, to work, to troubleshoot, to understand about ‘whats going on’.

Let’s take a look at one sample sector: IT Security.

How to teach a newcomer — a fresh graduate who has dreams to pursue his career in IT Security?

One of popular IT Security incident is called DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service). By terminology, it is explained as this:

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. — CloudFlare

Try to say that to a fresh graduate who has never been informed about IT Security before and you’ll see their eyebrows moving.

Well, you might then move to next strategy: explain with diagram.

DDoS

Sometimes it works. But in most of cases, they would still confused.

You can try another approach: let’s bring them into Security Operation Center (assuming it exist!), and show them the splendour dashboard showing interactive ‘real attack’ in action.

Interactive DDoS Attack Visualisation

The reason interactive data visualisation works is because of the rates at which our brain processes different sensations. It takes approximately 1/10 of a second to understand a photo, but reading 200 words takes approximately 60 seconds.

Not only do we process-visualisations faster, but we understand them with greater ease as well.

IT Security is complex. It is even more these days with various machine, apps, data come alive. It doesn’t make any more sense whenever a Security Engineer have to utilise old traditional approach when dealing with IT Security incidents.

Interactive data visualisation helps human understand the incident faster and helps human to plan not only remediation but also mitigation / prevention for future. As explained earlier, the world is getting more and more complex. By cutting the process from like 60 seconds to 1/10 of seconds, humans can add more value while doing the work and even increase the value of a product.

Increasing the product value through human intuition is my favourite parts. Have a look into this Data Framework.

D(I)5 Framework

I’ve been using the framework to design several products especially the ones that utilise and consume data. It’s been great so far. It’s even surprised me how simple — yet powerful it is to be implemented in a real world scenario.

As we can see, it is a cycle.

Human intuition plays critical role to add more values such as defining new kind of data to be collected.

But….

That can only be achieved efficiently if we implement Interaction phase correctly. Without proper features such as Intuitive-Interactive-Dashboard, human will have difficulties to validate the result and formulating new initiative or strategy for next data collection. That’s why, proper-correct-and beautifully design dashboard is important to help human understand the values inside data.

Its not easy to implement what I called splendour user interface. Really. I’ve been myself going through difficult time finding talents who can do that very well. Most software developer only thinking about functionality. Even with a title such as Software Designer or the popular UI/UX designer — most of them do not understand deeply the philosophy of good design for a software product.

However, some good talents are there.

And if you’ve found them, don’t forget to let them add the beauty into your product. Not only for functionality perspective, but to visualise splendidly how information presented to your user.

Let me say it again: Software Development is an Arts!