March 2016
Participation Supplement 6
Today we took a look at how visuals can either help or harm a work.  I was immediately reminded of something that has plagued my life recently, the GRE.  I am applying to PhD programs in the fall for computer science with a concentration in computer vision or something medical related, I have taken the GRE once and did fairly well on it, but I want to take it one more time to try to improve my score by a little.  One third of the GRE is quantitative, so it’s math questions.  Some of those math questions involve graphs.  ETS, the people who govern the GRE, intentionally give you graphs that are almost illegible, no joke, just to throw you off and make you hopefully get the question wrong.  They will give you a graph that is so clustered and put the font in such a weird angle that it’s nearly impossible to get any meaningful information from it.  It’s kind of a scam if you ask me.  After taking the GRE and being exposed to those poorly done graphs, it has made me more aware of what a good graph should look like.  It should be quick and easy to distinguish.  It should be readable and at the same time very informative.  It should take data and display it in a way that anyone can look at it and make sense from it, not just some very technical expert in the field.  We also discussed user interfaces that should follow the same principles that a graph should follow.  A user interface should have no learning curve so that a user can walk up to it, any user, and be able to quickly use and understand it.  These concepts of readability and usability are beneficial for a tech writer and a user interface developer.