Data Exploration on Smart Watches

This week I visited the St Andrews HCI Research Group (@sachi) to talk about the potential of smart watches as a vehicle for data visualisation.  For some time I’ve been thinking about the expansion of data visualisation into larger and larger screens and how this seems incongruous with the latest mobile wearables.

The discussions after the talk were very useful. In particular the blurred boundary being tablet to mobile and mobile to wearable. This division of labour is a personal preference and in many cases is situational and context specific. If we can somehow understand the motivation behind device switching, we can go some way towards understanding the need for visualisation. This is turn will help to focus research on the types of visualisation and the uses that users might have for it. There’s no need in designing without context, after all.