Original post January 2009
When you start to learn a new language – like Spanish, you don’t expect to understand a spanish news cast completely after the first class.
Then why do we have this enormous demand on gui and visualisation that is innovative to be completely and immidiately understood? Some things will take time to learn and comprehend. It is a visual language that needs to be learned and has the likeness to any other skill that the more you practise and use the skill, the more you can understand and comprehend.
I am all for immidiate understanding, but need to believe that some of the new visualisation techniques will have to be learned and understood before coming to its maximum usefulness. How can we otherwise dare to innovate?
What can we expect the user to learn before doing things with a Visualisation?
Sometimes it takes time to understand.