John Armitage is a strategic digital product designer and practice leader. During his 25-year career in the software industry, John has performed principal designer and team/practice leadership roles in consulting and development organizations for products in most major vertical markets and product architectures.John has studied and practiced design throughout his career. His specialty is to simplify otherwise complex or poorly understood business challenges, particularly those with an analytic or quantitative component, into elegant and coherent products that customers and users find appealing and useful. His foundational expertise in graphic design and the design thinking process infuse his work with timeless principles of aesthetics, usefulness, and practicality. His 10 years with business intelligence provider BusinessObjects, and then SAP, began with the creation of BOBJ's öèÓãÖ±²¥ team in Paris, France and growing the practice to 20 designers worldwide. John made the business case for öèÓãÖ±²¥ investment, introduced öèÓãÖ±²¥ practice to the organization through training courses in all global dev centers, and integrated öèÓãÖ±²¥ roles and deliverables into the product development lifecycle. In 2006 John's team designed one of the first chart-centric visual analytic product concepts, eventually productized as Visual Intelligence and now SAP's Lumira.During his final three years at SAP, John served in a research role to design next-generation solutions for visual analytic consumption. His visual analytic design language, codenamed LAVA, is being widely adopted across all SAP business units. Noted for it's radical simplicity and broad utility, LAVA positions SAP to bring practical, analytic decision-making to all areas of the enterprise.John creates value at all product levels, including basic design standards, new product features/versions, product concepts to inform business opportunities, and öèÓãÖ±²¥ strategies for executives. He is hands-on and leads by example.
Bringing Numbers to Life

The evolving digital landscape is changing how we interact with numbers in our work and personal lives. The Internet, unprecedented data creation & access, accelerating computing power, dynamic digital displays, social networks, and mobile content consumption are enabling breakthroughs in how quantitative data is presented, manipulated, and acted upon. In parallel, the Design Thinking movement is popularizing innovation methods long known by designers, allowing us to challenge deep-seated conventions of how the built world appears and behaves.
Bringing Numbers to Life: LAVA and Design-Led Innovation in Visual Analytics presents the context, process, and results of a multi-year investigation, at business software giant SAP, into how computing technology can better enable people to discover and make sense out of the numbers that impact them. The results will change how you view quantitative information. The story will empower you to achieve design goals despite seemingly impossible resistance. The book is packed with full-color and detailed examples, and includes Web access to videos, animations, documents, and design artifacts from the project.
John Armitage is a strategic digital product designer and practice leader. During his 25-year career in the software industry, he has performed principal designer and team/practice leadership roles in consulting and development organizations. Since 2002, he has led user experience design teams with Peoplesoft, BusinessObjects, SAP, and Host Analytics.
Bringing Numbers to Life: LAVA and Design-Led Innovation in Visual Analytics presents the context, process, and results of a multi-year investigation, at business software giant SAP, into how computing technology can better enable people to discover and make sense out of the numbers that impact them. The results will change how you view quantitative information. The story will empower you to achieve design goals despite seemingly impossible resistance. The book is packed with full-color and detailed examples, and includes Web access to videos, animations, documents, and design artifacts from the project.
John Armitage is a strategic digital product designer and practice leader. During his 25-year career in the software industry, he has performed principal designer and team/practice leadership roles in consulting and development organizations. Since 2002, he has led user experience design teams with Peoplesoft, BusinessObjects, SAP, and Host Analytics.
Table of Contents
-
0Introduction: Designers Nakedby John Armitage
-
1An Evocative Use Caseby John Armitage
-
2Articulating the Firehoseby John Armitage
-
3A Design Language for Visual Analyticsby John Armitage
-
4Forces Shaping Visual Analyticsby John Armitage
-
5History, Benefits & Catalystsby John Armitage
-
6Working With Numbersby John Armitage
-
7Red Herringsby John Armitage
-
8Understanding Information Workby John Armitage
-
9The Work Beginsby John Armitage
-
10The Responseby John Armitage
-
11Lava's Metric Systemby John Armitage
-
12Lava's Visual Systemby John Armitage
-
13Lava's Organization Systemby John Armitage
-
14Lava's Interaction System - Boards & Board Setsby John Armitage
-
15Lava's Interaction System - The Latticeby John Armitage
-
16Lava's Interaction System - Pointsby John Armitage
-
17Lava's Value Systemby John Armitage
-
18Other Examplesby John Armitage
-
19This Is My Story, & I'm Sticking to Itby John Armitage
-
20Going from Zero to Oneby John Armitage
-
21Chart of Darknessby John Armitage
-
22Representing the Formless, Malleable, Boundless, & Evolvingby John Armitage
-
23Free Samplesby John Armitage
-
24Conclusiveby John Armitage
-
25Appendixitisby John Armitage
-
26Glossaryby John Armitage