Tufte: USPTO dashboard "one of the worst interfaces ever designed"
edwardtufte.com
edwardtufte.com
http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml
Tufte doesn't appear to be exaggerating.
To quote Tufte from his link, "Can someone, perhaps an Inspector General, find out the cost and the contracting company that did this?"
You're confusing Tufte with a graphics designer. He's known for data visualization.
There's a huge difference between those two professions. Tufte is one of the old guard of information presentation - not pretty, not even good looking, but unambiguous and copiously informative. His displays is what you might find in an airplane cockpit, not a Web 2.0 website.
Data visualization and cognitive ergonomics are fields that existed long before CS, and should not be conflated with "design" as software geeks understand it.
Tufte makes a lot of noise about communicating complex information visually.
But frankly and ironically, he does an abysmal job of this himself. Have you ever looked at his books? They're a hodge podge of unrelated, poorly visually articulated thoughts that fail to create a larger narrative.
I think the biggest problem is that he's considered the go-to guy on this, when in reality his own work is substandard at best.
The USPTO has built its dashboard around familiar looking instruments - ones that work in many other contexts (airplanes, cars, etc), but is completely inappropriate in their usage.
A dial in a cockpit is not a trivially designed instrument - it provides valuable context to the operator that simply hasn't been replicated in the USPTO dashboard. The rate at which a needle moves gives valuable feedback as to the rate of change of value - the needles on the USPTO page doesn't even move. Similarly, a dial can be a valuable glimpse at the current quantity in relation to the whole (e.g., a tachometer, or a fuel gauge), but few of the dials on the USPTO dashboard have this relevance.
In other words, the entire point of the original post lampooning this dashboard is that they chose ways to represent the information that's pretty, but entirely inappropriate for the data they're trying to communicate, which not only makes it useless, but misleading as well. You drawing this comparison to the airplane cockpit (a comparatively well-designed, well-thought out interface that does use appropriate representations for information) really completely misses the point.