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Some things are obviously most appropriately organised by time; public transport timetables, tide charts, chronologies of historical events, museum exhibits (especially those that follow through an ideological program such as representing evolutionary change or artistic development... see museums >>), etc. Many other kinds of information, however, particular many forms of instruction, are also most appropriated expressed sequentially over time; e.g cooking, creating an animation or project-management for site production, building furniture or stretching a canvas... all of these are expressed as a series of steps optimally arranged in time.
Time can be specified in minutes, hours, days, months, years, centuries, processes, and milestones.
Organising information by time lends itself most aptly to sequential linear arrangements such as timelines etc., but it also opens the possibility for cyclical material; e.g gardeners' almanacs, maintenance schedules, babycare instructions, patient-care regimes, in fact almost anything that has to be repeated regularly.
Very
often a sequence is controlled because it can also suggest the dimension
of time as in a natural history display of evolutionary development or
in a museum showing the history of a town or in a gallery devoted to a
school of painting. But whether the path is tightly controlled or relatively
undetermined, our experience of an exhibition is nevertheless always some
kind of mosaic built up in our minds as a result of serial viewingÉSignificantly
some of the earliest spaces which were designed specifically for display,
such as the gallery at Sabbioneta or the Antiquarium at the Residenz in
Munich, were long tunnel-like rooms in which objects can be seen in sequence.
Brawne, M.,
The Museum Interior: Temporary + Permanent Display Techniques
Most instructional graphics and users' manuals are arranged sequentially, each step placed in a temporal relation with all the others. Instructions seldom specify a particular time to undertake any particular step of the process, but their order is immutable. It would be impossible, for example, to make a soufflé if the instructions were not arranged in correct temporal order -- if you were instructed to fold all the ingredients together before being instructed to beat the eggwhites until stiff, the end result would simply be an indigestible mess.
Whilst this may seem obvious, transactional sites such as online shopping, banking and multi-user games need to ensure that the temporal order of the steps that users need to accomplish to successfully complete their transaction are clear and unambiguous.
Processes should to be rigorously analysed and broken down into logical components.
More
about instructional graphics  |
There's a timeline for almost any subject you can think of somewhere on line. These timelines are most commonly produced by individuals, perhaps as a personal aid for their research interests, and offered for others' use and enjoyment. More rarely, they have been produced by organisations or companies that have decided to invest profession research and design in them. It doesn't seem to make much difference to the end product. Almost all online timelines suffer from the limitations of the medium, especially small screens and low resolution.
In addition, the (relatively) low cost of continuously adding to and updating online material
 The
computer screen is not very good at displaying a big historical timeline;
the low typographic resolution of the screen forces viewers to scroll
endlessly through century after century (and, even worse, horizontal
scrolling). Perhaps, on the computer screen, time should flow vertically,
with events described by lines of horizontal type at each date. On
the other hand, it is nice to maintain the time-flowing-left-to-right
convention used in excellent timelines (printed, lots of overlapping
events, hundreds of events). Edward Tufte, Ask ET, 2002 |
horizontal timelines
Google's summary of the searches of 2001
A graphic representation of the most common searches conducted by users over a year.
This timeline swops image for brief information text on mouse-over and jumps to in-depth information on mouse-down.
vertical timelines
See Persistence of Vision: History of animation
This format allows the user to quickly grasp the sequence of innovations in the development of animation and gather in-depth information on-site about most of them, plus follow off-site links to a wide variety of related specialist sites.
matrix timelines
Complex chronologies often make use of a matrix display. It allows the user to quickly compare temporal occurrence of related information. Typically, one axis will display chronological information whilst the other may display geographical, subject or any other criteria.
A simple but highly effective example of historical information displayed on a matrix is Seven Years of 3D Graphics, a chart which compares the announcement and development of various graphics accelerator cards by leading PC chip-manufacturers.
History Matrix primarily uses the matrix format to display information from prehistory to the present day about a range of diverse topics from gardens to communications technologies, and from around the world. The sheer volume of information included and the overlap between subject areas posed serious challenges. Topic information is differentiated by colour and topic-specific chronologies can be accessed by a parallel navigation bar at the top of the window.
Projects undertaken at MIT's Visible Language Workshop under the supervision of Muriel Cooper have suggested the utility of three-dimensional matrices for navigating and gaining a conceptual overview or mental model of complex data sets. Whilst many of these projects require top-end technology to run, Cooper's students have also explored simpler three-dimensional timeline presentations.
Another ex-MIT student, Robin Kullberg, has completed both a thesis and demonstration investigating three-dimensional matrix interfaces in presenting in-depth information about the history of photography.
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