Archive: Information Design
August 30, 2010, 10:03 am
Teaching Many Many People in a Leveraged Way
by Henry Woodbury
My title is Bill Gates talking. He is talking about Sal Kahn, Harvard MBA, former hedge fund manager, and now the one man show behind online learning site Kahn Academy. Here is Gates at more length:
There’s a web site that I’ve been using with my kids recently called Kahn Academy, K A H N, just one guy doing some unbelievable 15 minute tutorials…. He was a hedge fund guy making lots of money and he quit to do these little web videos and so we’ve moved I’d say about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category and so that was a good day — the day his wife let him quit his job.
Kahn’s YouTube videos feature his voice and an electronic blackboard that present bitmap images and (mostly) Kahn’s notes and annotations. Here’s an example, Basic Multiplication:
This approach is extremely efficient and extremely effective. Speaker and blackboard (or whiteboard). That’s all.
When Gates talks about “leverage” this is part of what he means. The pedagogical simplicity of Kahn’s approach makes his materials very accessible and allows him to develop his lectures quickly. Their succinctness allows him to tailor each one to a specific level of ability. The other aspect of “leverage” is technological. By using the common YouTube video format, Kahn can reach anyone and everyone with a decent Internet connection. There are no additional distribution barriers. Makers of educational software should take note.
August 25, 2010, 9:32 am
Egg Cracking Technique
by Henry Woodbury
A friend linked me to the delightful They Draw and Cook web site (thanks Katy!). Here you have simple recipes rendered by artists and illustrators. Many are no more than decorated recipe cards, but some clamber over the illustration fence into visual explanation territory. An example is Alex Savakis’s egg cracking technique:
In this one, the text is superfluous.
August 10, 2010, 11:54 am
The Dugout Canoe Description of My Job
by Henry Woodbury
The Edge Annual Question for 2010 goes out to a bevy of deep thinkers:
How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?
Is it? That’s up to you. Editor and Publisher John Brockman anticipates the point:
We spent a lot of time going back on forth on “YOU” vs. “WE” and came to the conclusion to go with “YOU”, the reason being that Edge is a conversation. “WE” responses tend to come across like expert papers, public pronouncements, or talks delivered from stage.
Science historian George Dyson offers an evocative response:
In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.
The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat / minimum material — by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
Give us a tree and we’ll carve your canoe. That is what Tim Roy is talking about.
(h/t to Andrew Gilmartin who linked to Dyson’s quote on Facebook. Andrew blogs here.)
Update: I rewrote my lede, up to the Dyson quote, to add context and incorporate Brockman’s “you” vs. “we” statement.
July 10, 2010, 10:27 am
Boomtown
by Henry Woodbury
At FlowingData, Nathan Yau’s popular visualization on the growth of Walmart recently got an update — “now with 100% more Sam’s Club” he titles it, tongue in cheek. The growth map shows the number of new store openings for Walmart — and Sam’s Club — from 1962 through 2010. The data is just for the United States. The animation reveals both a pattern and rate of growth as Walmart starts at a single location, becomes a regional chain, then expands to the U.S.’s Northeastern and Western population corridors. Zoom out (the plus/minus in the bottom left corner are zoom controls) and you will see the firm’s entry into Puerto Rico in the early ’70s and to Alaska and Hawaii in the late ’90s.
The data does not include store closings, a point that comes out in the comments of the first link. Designer-statisticians can only work with the data they have.
June 3, 2010, 11:08 am
Visual Bias at Work
by Henry Woodbury
Last week I blogged about a Harvard Business Review article on the inherent biases in visualization. Visual information makes people overconfident of outcomes.
Today the New York Times offers a perfect example. In the debate around U.S. health care overhaul, the president’s budget director Peter Orszag argued that savings could be found by reforming the current system:
Mr Orszag displayed maps produced by Dartmouth researchers that appeared to show where the waste in the system could be found. Beige meant hospitals and regions that offered good, efficient care; chocolate meant bad and inefficient.
The maps made reform seem relatively easy to many in Congress, some of whom demanded the administration simply trim the money Medicare pays to hospitals and doctors in the brown zones. The administration promised to seriously consider doing just that. [my emphasis]
Unfortunately, the maps don’t show what they seem to show. While they show cost of care (a very specific kind of care it should be noted), they don’t show quality of care. Nor do the maps show anything about the demographics of the patients being cared for.
The Times compares the Dartmouth map (on the left) to Medicare’s own analysis of hospital quality (on the right) to show the disconnect. However, the Medicare map raises questions of its own. To start with, it shows a suspicious correspondence to U.S. population density.
Perhaps quality of care relates to the proposition that higher population density creates demand for more specialists which leads to better diagnoses. I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of this. Before anyone draws another map, let’s work on better analysis.
May 25, 2010, 2:58 pm
Simplifying The Story of Stuff
by Lisa Agustin
Seemingly simple stories often have complex beginnings. Consider the well-known web film (and now book) The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. A longtime activist with an interest in waste and its impact on the environment, Leonard was attending a leadership training program when she was asked to give a presentation. She was shocked to find that no one knew what she was talking about. Attendees pointed out that her vocabulary needed simplification and that she was “starting the conversation 20 years down the road.” What to do? Simplify the story:
Humbled, Leonard tried new angles. They all failed. Finally, in frustration, she hung a huge sheet of paper on the wall and crudely drew a mountain, a truck, a factory, a store, and a dump. And then she told the story of stuff. “You ought to make a movie of that,” 30 different people said. [Post-institute, Leonard] traveled the country with her sketch. The rest is Internet history.
Instead of creating “a paradigm shift in relation to materials,” Leonard started asking “Where does all the stuff we buy come from, and where does it go when we throw it out?” By combining this straightforward approach with a simplified visual style (animated stick-figures), Leonard’s film engages and enlightens in a way that makes viewers easily see what the problem is and how they can make a difference.
April 14, 2010, 8:38 am
“Just because it’s graphical, it doesn’t mean it’s useful”
by Henry Woodbury
Phyl Gyford graphs the “infographics” that give infographics a bad name. For example:
Click through to see the whole thing.
April 8, 2010, 4:57 pm
Guest Teaching InfoViz
by Kirsten Robinson
Dr. Bill Gribbons at Bentley University recently invited Dynamic Diagrams to present some of our work to his Information Visualization class. The class is part of the Master’s degree program in Human Factors in Information Design, of which I’m an alumna.
After I gave a brief introduction to Dynamic Diagrams, Piotr took the spotlight, showing a wide variety of visual explanations from past and present projects. Examples included highly detailed web site inventories and architecture diagrams, process illustrations, data visualizations, and animated 3D models. While Piotr explained the challenges and design solutions for each project, I played Vanna White, zooming and scrolling so the students (some of whom were attending online) could see relevant sections.
It was a great experience for me to revisit some of the past work (Samsung Electronics, Holtzbrinck), and to understand some of the more recent work (Getty) in greater depth. There never seems to be enough time to sit back and appreciate our colleagues’ work during a normal workday.
Holtzbrinck web properties inventory
The best part was hearing the audible gasps as we revealed each new piece. As part of their coursework, students are required to create their own information displays, while also explaining the human factors (visual and cognitive) that help or hinder our ability to process them. I hope we were able to provide a bit of inspiration for their next projects!
April 6, 2010, 11:06 am
The Audience-First News
by Henry Woodbury
Turns out that Rupert Murdoch agrees with me about content:
At the completely unironic paidContent.org, John Yemma, Editor of The Christian Science Monitor, picks up the theme, and elaborates:
Yes, people want multimedia. They want games, maps, 30 Rock on Hulu, bootlegged first-run movies from Pirate Bay, and whacked-out amateur videos on YouTube and a dozen other sites. But there’s no evidence that they want, for instance, a thoughtful interactive map/video/database mashup on Afghanistan or global warming on which they can comment. There’s no evidence that users love these things so much that they flock to them, stay around, and convert to a news site’s brand because of cool multimedia.
Yemma differs from Murdoch in his lack of love for paywalls. Instead he advances an updated version of the click-through mantra of 00s:
What we’re learning is that the key to building and keeping traffic is far more prosaic than multimedia and sharing buttons. It rests on overcoming a huge cultural barrier: evolving a serious, experienced, thoughtful newsroom into an audience-first organization. I use the term “evolving” because this is all about the present tense. Trying to understand our current and future audience is a work in progress that will continue for as long as we publish on the web.
How far removed from being “audience-first” is your web presence? It’s worth some thought. And see what Yemma says about Sandra Bullock.
March 25, 2010, 9:58 am
The Long Shot
by Henry Woodbury
This beautiful diagram, created by Bryan Christie Design for an IEEE Spectrum special report on Mars packs a lot of data into a small space, down to the specifics of the name of each mission.
Yet, with all the data, the overarching story comes through clearly: Up until this decade, most Mars missions failed. Because of the Soviet Union’s dreary record, it is easy, at first to misread orange for failure and blue for success. But a quick check at the labels makes it easy to reorient. Don’t draw the short straw.
(h/t i09)
March 19, 2010, 10:38 am
It’s Tournament Time
by Henry Woodbury
The Mens Division I NCAA Basketball Tournament bracket is one of the most iconic images in U.S. sports. Voila:
So what can an information designer do with this?
Cliff Kuang at Fast Company looked around the web to find out. His selection for “best designed bracket” goes to NBC Sports:
Why? Because it’s a bonafide [sic] infographic–basically a cheat-sheet that allows anyone with only a passing interest in college basketball to sound smart after about five minutes of studying.
The NBC Bracket is here. It’s interactive, but broken. Hey NBC! Fix that absolute positioning.
Update: It’s fixed now.
March 17, 2010, 12:06 pm
Your Data is my Distraction
by Henry Woodbury
I recently ran across a still-fresh 2009 Nieman Journalism Lab post on “ambient visual data” — a good term for the practice of graphically incorporating metadata into a content-delivery interface. The most common idea seems to be adding subtle bar charts beneath or around links to illustrate various kinds of popularity.
To explain the importance of the concept, author Haley Sweetland Edwards turns to designer Eliazar Parra Cardenas, creator of Backbars, “a GreaseMonkey script to turn the headlines and comments of social link-sites into ambient bar charts (of votes/diggs/views/users…).” Cardenas explains:
“The whole point is to make textual information easier to absorb… [A well-designed site] should maximize the information that a user can understand — that you can just glance at, or take note of -– without actively thinking….
“We’ve already tried the obvious in print: putting as much text as possible in one glance (hence broadsheets), mixing in images, headlines, columns. I think the next step will be digital developments like backbars, favicons, sparklines, word coloring, spacings.”
Count me as extremely skeptical. The sites that Edwards and Cardenas hold up as examples seem both cluttered and shallow — a vote-stuffing contest for “news of the weird.”
I’m old school that way. What drives traffic are the editorial and authorial inputs that Cardenas overlooks in his list of the obvious. Not headlines, but well-written headlines. Not images, but compelling images. Not backbars, favicons, sparklines, word coloring, and spacings, but good ledes.
The New York Times isn’t making money online. But they aren’t lacking for traffic.
February 26, 2010, 3:34 pm
Man as Industrial Palace Animation
by Lisa Agustin
We sometimes use “little people” to depict complex processes, with multiple actors participating in a real-life process (e.g., online collaboration or editorial workflow). But little people can also be used to illustrate processes as they might be imagined. Physician and science writer Fritz Kahn (1888-1968) often used the man-as-machine analogy to show functions and features of the human body. One of Kahn’s most famous works is the “Man as Industrial Palace” poster from 1927. Designer Henning Lederer brings the poster to life with this clever animation that illustrates several systems of the human body, including respiratory, circulatory, digestive, and nervous.
Read more about Lederer’s project: http://www.industriepalast.com/
[via Flowing Data]
February 20, 2010, 10:42 am
Visualizing More Affordable Care
by Henry Woodbury
The February 2010 issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology features work by Dynamic Diagrams for an article titled Alternatives to a Routine Follow-Up Visit for Early Medical Abortion. The article describes a protocol for assessing a woman’s health after an abortion without routine use of ultrasonography. To quote from the abstract:
We constructed five model algorithms for evaluating women’s postabortion status, each using a different assortment of data. Four of the algorithms (algorithms 1–4) rely on data collected by the woman and on the results of the low-sensitivity pregnancy test. Algorithm 5 relies on the woman’s assessment, the results of the pregnancy test, and follow-up physician assessment (sometimes including bimanual or speculum examination).
A sponsor of the study, Gynuity Health Products, asked Dynamic Diagrams to visualize the data. Our explanation shows the results for the current standard of care and five algorithms tested by the researchers. For each approach we show the total number of cases, the number of women returning to a clinic for a follow-up visit, and the number of women receiving a follow-up ultrasound. In contrasting colors we show specific additional treatment cases in two columns; those identified by the protocol on the left vs. those not necessarily identified by the protocol on the right. In large type we provided the percentage of the number of follow-up ultrasounds to the total number of cases. This combination of rich data points and a key percentage makes it easy to compare the effectiveness of each algorithm. A sample of this visual language (without labels) is shown below:
While we cannot reprint the full text of article, we can provide the visual explanation used as Figure 2: Algorithms identifying women who received additional care after medical abortion (PDF, 409K).
February 5, 2010, 2:07 pm
Brainstorming A History of the World
by Lisa Agustin
Rattle offers its first blog post on developing the user experience strategy for “A History of the World,” the companion web site for the BBC Radio 4 series of the same name. Written and narrated by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, the radio program travels through two million years to tell the history of humanity through 100 handmade objects from the Museum, ranging from a stone chopping tool to the cell phone. The web site enables exploration of these objects in detail, but also gives users the opportunity to participate by commenting on the collection or uploading images from their own personal collections. Rattle’s initial post walks us through general principles from their brief (e.g., “some use of participatory media”), the resulting strategic goals (e.g., “focus on attracting, rewarding, and promoting a small minority of contributors”), and its initial brainstorm of features (e.g., “select 10 objects to represent the History of Me”). Now that the site is live, it will be interesting to read future installments to see how these initial high-level goals and blue-sky thinking compare to what was actually developed.
February 2, 2010, 1:21 pm
Easy = True
by Henry Woodbury
An interesting article on “cognitive fluency” offers this great (ironic) infographic:
Reporter Drake Bennett leads with the fact that “shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names.” He continues:
Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author (my emphasis).
However, the flip side of easy equals true — or “an instinctive preference for the familiar” as Bennett defines the concept — is that to generate reflection or curiosity, you may need to make things less familiar. It’s a good thing we know how to do both.
February 2, 2010, 9:43 am
Rendered in Neat Circles
by Henry Woodbury
Popular Science links to another interesting information graphic on space exploration. This one, designed by Michael Paukner, illustrates the number of human-created objects orbiting Earth — and assigns responsibility:
You can view larger versions on Paukner’s Flickr page.
The title of my post comes from the Popular Science URL: see-space-debris-cloud-surrounding-earth-rendered-neat-circles. Ironically, this summarizes the problem with the visualization. Despite the attractiveness of the graphic, the neat circles show linear values by area, making precise comparisons completely impossible.
The donut shapes created by the overlapping circles also confuse comparison. Take a quick look at the darkest circles– that for space debris — around the United States and Russia. The United States is bigger, but by what order of magnitude? We see a lot more black — a thicker torus– but the actual ratio is just 1.2 to 1.
January 30, 2010, 9:23 pm
Real-Time Bus Location
by Henry Woodbury
Using GPS and Google Maps, MASCO — the Medical Academic and Scientific Community Organization, Inc., of Boston, Massachusetts — offers this elegant real-time bus map for its shuttle service. The map shows buses in service, their location, and their direction of travel.
For folks waiting at the bus stop, the service is accessible via web-enabled phone at http://shuttles.masco.org/m.
December 22, 2009, 12:20 pm
Hiding Text in PowerPoint
by Lisa Agustin
I stumbled on this odd post about the use of PowerPoint in the college classroom. The basic question is this: How do you help students who rely on your PowerPoint slides as a study aid, especially if they missed the class? Some academics are aware of PowerPoint best practices, but Julianne Dalcanton suggests the following as a way to help students without breaking the rules:
My trick for [giving students the key points without cluttering the slide] is using black text on a black background. The text doesn’t show on the screen, but it does show up when printed as a handout, since the black background defaults back to white. Thus, you get the following:
Dalcanton should rethink her approach. Hiding the bulleted text so it will appear when printed wrongly assumes everyone will want (or remember) to print it, and using a black background with red text results in poor legibility (not to mention encouraging a nice nap if the lecture takes place in a dark room). In short, she’s sacrificing a good presentation for the sake of printability. Other problems with this slide:
- The graph is key to the slide and should be bigger. Remove the box that surrounds the question, since this is visually distracting. If the question itself is a key point, hopefully a subsequent slide answers the question.
- The language in the bottom-right comment needs the speaker to provide context. What does “This” refer to–the graph? If it’s important to connect energy loss with calculating the age of the universe, spell this out explicitly.
- The bullet points are better placed in the Notes area, but Dalcanton isn’t a fan of this feature (see comments following her post). If the bulleted text must be kept in the slide, it shouldn’t be sized for presentation, since this is a waste of slide real estate. Instead, use a smaller font, and move the bullets to the bottom of the page. Then use a color other than black for the font and matching background color (we used white, and this prints fine).
Our quick redo shows the presentation version on the left, and the printed version on the right. The bulleted text is in ten-point font, and legible when printed.
December 22, 2009, 11:18 am
Mashing Up Suggestions
by Henry Woodbury
In The New York Times, IBM scientists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg have some fun with search engine auto-suggestions. Type in even a single word and you receive “a list of suggested, presumably popular completions.” (In courtroom dramas, this is called leading the witness.)
The fun is seeing how different investigations overlap. Here’s one example:
December 14, 2009, 10:59 am
The Periodic Box of Chocolates
by Henry Woodbury
People seem to forget that the periodic table is a table because it reads in two dimensions. Read it left to right and atomic weight increases. Read it top to bottom and you find elements with similar properties — for example, the alkali metals in group 1 or the noble gases in group 18. The gaps in periods 1, 2, and 3 represent physical realities about the electron configuration of those lighter elements (see this Periodic Table by Chemicool).
Most attempts to fit other data sets to the periodic table result in strange confections.
This Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is a prime example. A simple categorized list is puddled into the matrix of Dmitri Mendeleev’s table and shoved around to fit. There are exactly six “compound visualizations.” How serendipitous. The really interesting data — the examples of the methods — are hidden under reductive two-letter acronyms, making comparison impossible even when you do find something interesting.
If the categories are meaningful and not just quantified to fit the table, the next step is to abandon the presentation method that doesn’t work and come up with one that does.
December 3, 2009, 2:57 pm
Will Better-Looking Money Improve the Economy?
by Lisa Agustin
With the economic recovery taking longer than expected, is it time for politicians to step aside and give designers a shot at it? Over the summer, creative strategy consultant Richard Smith sponsored the Dollar ReDe$ign Project, suggesting that rebranding the US Dollar would boost consumer confidence and, as a result, jumpstart the economy. (Check out the winning entry by Kyle R. Thompson.) But is an image makeover really enough? After all, it’s less about what the currency looks like and more about what it’s worth.
Better-looking money needs to be part of a well-thought out commerce-based model. Consider the Brixton Pound out of the UK (pictured above) or the BerkShares, created for the Berkshire region of Massachusetts. Both are examples of local currencies created to stimulate local economic development. How it works in a nutshell: National currency is exchanged for local currency at designated exchange locations. The consumer can then use the local money at businesses that have agreed to accept it. Depending on the specific model, there are pre-arranged benefits, like exclusive offers or discounts to users of the local currency. For example, the BerkShares model has a five-percent discount that is part of the exchange rate (ninety-five cents per BerkShare). An example of how it works:
One day, you decide to go out for a nice dinner. You go to the bank to purchase BerkShares to spend at a local restaurant. You go in with 95 federal dollars and exchange them for 100 BerkShares. You go to dinner, and the total cost comes to $100. The restaurant accepts BerkShares in full, so you pay entirely in BerkShares. Therefore, you’ve spent 95 federal dollars and received a $100 meal – a five percent discount for you. The owner of the restaurant now has 100 BerkShares. They decide that they need to deposit them for federal dollars and return them to the bank. When they bring them to the bank, the banker deposits the 100 BerkShares you spent on dinner and gives the restaurant $95 federal dollars, the same 95 dollars that you had originally exchanged for BerkShares. The end result? You receive a five percent discount because of the initial exchange, but the same $95 you originally traded for BerkShares all goes to the business where you spent those BerkShares.
Yes, there’s some cool-looking money involved, and yes, it does something for instilling local pride. But more important, these models demonstrate that design can play a role in solving real problems (like a sluggish economy), and providing tangible benefits to those involved.
December 3, 2009, 11:28 am
What once was print…
by Matt DeMeis
…is now being done very effectively with new technology. Flyp media captures that cozy feeling of thumbing through a magazine and translates it to the internet in one of the best ways I have seen in a while. It’s news, in a more exciting format. Video, audio and elegantly designed layouts definitely give a nod to the print world, all while being more exciting than a piece of paper could ever be.
December 2, 2009, 3:31 pm
Highly Targeted Healthcare Marketing
by Matt DeMeis
These days health care is a slippery subject. This isn’t about politics or any of that. Today I came across (what I think to be) a brilliant way of marketing health care to an audience that usually forgoes coverage, Xtreme sports enthusiasts. Tonik Health Insurance has taken the daunting task of securing coverage for yourself and made it incredibly easy.
Tonik targets a finite demographic and gives them access to the information the need in a design they can relate to. In one or two clicks I was able to find all that I needed to know about purchasing a plan from them. Once you decide on a coverage level you simply fill out a form. For comparison I went to an undisclosed giant’s web site to try and find the same info (still pretending I was an Xtreme sports enthusiast of course). I gave up after some dead end digging and suggestions to download PDFs. It seemed more effort was put into the stock photography than the user experience. Ease of use is CRUCIAL for the audience Tonik is targeting. Their potential customer wants information fast. No digging. No downloading.
The design is great. Loud but very minimalist. It’s tailored for a younger, action sports lifestyle audience and it does that perfectly. Bold colors and lots of flash but these things don’t hide the information. Wonder what “$5000 deductible” means on the thrill-seeker plan? click the question mark next to the word. Easy.
Now to be fair it must be noted that Tonik is a division of Blue Cross, an industry giant. They don’t serve every demographic, there is no “family thrill-seeker” package yet, but there is a lot to be learned by how smart and easy this site has made a somewhat complicated decision. Check it out at www.tonikhealth.com
November 18, 2009, 8:55 am
Resume as Infographic
by Kirsten Robinson
Designer Michael Anderson has created an infographic representation of his resume:
View the full-size image.
November 17, 2009, 5:16 pm
The Sweet Spot Between Information and Design
by Kim Looney
Trying to explain what information design is to our families and friends, and yes, potential clients, has been an ongoing challenge for us here at Dynamic Diagrams. Verbally, I usually resort to something about creating visual explanations for complex sets of data. But that doesn’t really satisfy anyone.
Venn Diagram
Information is Beautiful recently took on the same question on their blog. Their visual approach tries to show–with a Venn diagram-in-progress–what information is; what design is; and what happens when these overlap. Not every product of the two entities is a win: some are useless, some are ugly, and some are boring. But, there is a sweet spot where interestingness + function + form + integrity = successful information design.
November 9, 2009, 11:20 am
Abstract Berlin
by Henry Woodbury
Christopher Niemann has combined history and personal narrative to tell the story of the Berlin Wall, in words and stunningly simple images:
Niemann’s iconic images reference specific events and larger ideas. One image shows an East German border guard hurdling barbed wire to escape into the West. Other images remind me of M.C. Escher’s tessellated patterns, reduced to elemental form. Niemann’s underlying theme is the transformation of a city, history as augury and echo.
November 5, 2009, 12:25 pm
Follow the Necktie
by Henry Woodbury
It is always interesting to me to see how designers using different methods tackle some of the same visualization challenges that we do. How do you represent an abstract idea like “mobility” or “business”?
Here is Virtualization in Plain English, a marketing video for Intel made by Common Craft.
Keep track of that necktie.
September 4, 2009, 1:12 pm
The Times Goes Google on Us
by Henry Woodbury
I just discovered the New York Times Developer Network.
This resource provides data from The Times to third party developers through content-related APIs:
Our APIs (application programming interfaces) allow you to programmatically access New York Times data for use in your own applications. Our goal is to facilitate a wide range of uses, from custom link lists to complex visualizations. Why just read the news when you can hack it?
Most or all of the APIs respond to a query by returning data in XML or JSON format. Some developers have built custom search engines and topic-specific mashups around this functionality. Others are more interested in the sheer excess of the data — and how it can be visualized.
Artist Jer Thorp is one of the latter. Thorp accesses the Times Article Search API to create visualizations that compare the frequency of key words over time. The image below, for example, compares ’sex’ and ’scandal’ from 1981 – 2008:
When you zoom in, the visualization reveals branching segments called “org facets”. Thorp writes:
[These are] organizations which were associated with the stories that were found in the keyword search. This is one of the nicest things about the NYTimes API – you can ask for and process all kinds of interesting information past the standard “how many articles?” queries.
August 27, 2009, 3:09 pm
Craigslist Makeover
by Matt DeMeis
Wired has a very interesting article up right now. Several well known designers were asked to give hypothetical makeovers to Craigslist. I use CL all the time and honestly, I have never really had a usability problem of any kind. It does what it is meant to do quite well and is a true example of a simple utilitarian web service. I don’t own an iPhone or Blackberry so mobile access hasn’t been an issue for me. That seems to be the biggest argument for some kind of partial redesign (if only for mobile clients). A lot of the designers agree “why fix what’s not broken” (myself included) but it’s still interesting to see the results. Some better than others. My take on the submitted designs…
Favorite: Simple Scott
Least Favorite: Studio8
Middle Ground: Khoi Vinh
August 19, 2009, 9:50 am
You Are…
by Matt DeMeis
MIT Phd student Aaron Zinman has created an interesting data driven visualization experiment called “Personas”. Simply enter your name and a Flash app scours the web for bits and pieces of information about you. As it does so, its progress is displayed in visual form (albeit at warp speed, so it’s more for “ooh ahh” factor than usefulness). You are then characterized as a colored strip of categories ranging from books, sports, management and aggression to education, legal and illegal (activities?). It’s an interesting experiment. I think it would be great to have a bit more control over the categories and info about the user. Just to help weed out the cruft. As is, it’s probably pretty inaccurate for someone with the name Bob Smith or Michael Jackson. I am curious what our resident Flash maven Piotr would add to it. Go try it out over at the MIT site.
April 22, 2009, 8:27 am
Broken on Purpose
by Henry Woodbury
Seth Godin at Gel 2006 explains how This is broken. What is broken? Almost everything.
Including Napoleon’s March to Moscow.
Starting at 17:53, Godin buries Edward Tufte in order to praise him. Note that Godin doesn’t really bother with the graph itself, but rather Tufte’s promotion of it as “the best graph ever made.” Godin responds:
I think he’s completely out of his gourd and totally wrong!
If you need to spend 15 minutes studying a graph you might as well read the text underneath. Godin then backs off. Tufte’s promotion of Napoleon’s March, he says, is an example of something “broken on purpose”:
For the kind of person you want to reach — they want to read a complicated difficult to understand graph and get the satisfaction of figuring it out, because then they get it…. Sometimes the best thing to do is break it for the people you don’t care about and just make it work for the people you do.
Agree?
Watch the rest of the talk as well. It’s a very funny, pointed critique of bad information and product design.
April 9, 2009, 6:30 am
Charts Rule!
by Kirsten Robinson
From the folks at PBS Kids, it’s “Conjunction Junction” for the info vis set. Although, I’m sure some of my colleagues would take issue with the 3D pie charts.
March 19, 2009, 1:25 pm
An Introduction to Information Design: A Manual for Advocacy Groups
by Maia Garau
Tactical Tech and John Emerson of Backspace have published a useful information design manual for NGOs looking to strengthen the impact of their campaigns:
Information design uses pictures, symbols, colors, and words to communicate ideas, illustrate information or express relationships visually… It is not the same as graphic design, nor is it only about making something aesthetically pleasing. It’s not about branding, style, making a glossy product or something that looks “corporate.”
They add that information design is not about making something aesthetically pleasing, but about making your data clear, compelling and convincing (to which I would add memorable).
The authors make a convincing case for using information design to effect social change at many levels. Information design is a powerful tool not only for storytelling but also for the earlier stages of discovery (finding patterns) and decision-making (making comparisons and weighing options).
Download the pamphlet here or or request a copy.
February 24, 2009, 12:40 pm
Global Problems Demand Good Maps
by Henry Woodbury
The study of climate change is a global endeavor which means that data is often plotted to continental or world maps. As such, many of the challenges of good map making reappear as problems in presenting climate change data. Two researchers at the University of Idaho, Jean McKendry and Gary Machlis, point out that a key map from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers (PDF, p. 10), fails in both intelligibility and accuracy:
One of the most common ways in which climate maps can be misleading is to fail to take account of the map’s projection. “All map projections have distortions (distance, area, direction, and/or shape). For example, if temperature is displayed using coloured squares of equal size across the map, but the map projection does not minimize areal distortion, the squares appear to but do not represent equal areas on the Earth,” McKendry told environmentalresearchweb.
Other problems include overlapping data points, a multi-colored data scale, and unclear labels.
The map is reproduced below in all of its orange glory:
January 12, 2009, 10:24 am
Ahead of Our Time?
by Matt DeMeis
I came across this video recently titled “Did You Know” that was created by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and XPLANE. It reminded me of a project dD created almost 8 years prior called “Global Village”. I dug around in our archive and after some careful cross converting and video capturing (the first generation ActionScript didn’t want to play nice), I was able to resurrect the presentation. Some of the sound effects were lost due to the age of the file but it’s enough to show the similarities between the two. It’s not as fancy as the 2007 “Did You Know” but the way the visual statistics are represented has much more of an impact. Have a look…
“Global Village” 1999-2000
“Did You Know” 2007
January 9, 2009, 10:34 am
History of Visual Communication
by Kirsten Robinson
Elif Ayiter, a doctoral student at the University of Plymouth, has pubished an illustrated history of visual communication on the web, covering everything from cave paintings to graphical user interfaces. I was particularly struck by the transition from illuminated manuscripts to printed books and how much uglier the mass-produced books were by comparison.
December 17, 2008, 11:03 am
Rivermap Visualization by Kerr | Noble
by Lisa Agustin
The recently announced breakup of design studio Kerr | Noble prompted me to revisit some of their work, including “Rivermap” from 1999, in which the meandering contours of the River Thames are depicted using the John Banck’s poem from 1783, “A Description of London.” The map uses the Caslon font, which was designed at the same time that the poem was written. Lovely.
See the London Design Museum’s site for an interview with the duo, including samples of their work.
November 19, 2008, 11:32 am
Up in Smoke
by Lisa Agustin
GOOD magazine offers an interactive visualization illustrating where people in the U.S. are still smoking — an interesting question, given recent smoking bans in eating and drinking establishments. Roll over a state to see which bans are in place (none, workplace, restaurant, bar), what percentage of the state’s population smokes, and the price for a pack of cigarettes. The state’s national ranking with regard to number of smokers and pack price are also presented. Overall, it’s a good approach: users can focus on single states, and also get a nationwide picture of bans and smoking populations. But I found the use of visual metaphors — a cigarette for smoker percentage and a pack of cigarettes for the pack’s price–to be distracting. (I originally mistook the cigarette as a bar graph measuring two different variables.) For example, it’s unclear if a cigarette that extends the full width of the column equals 100%, and what the tallest pack of cigarettes cost (my guess was $7.00). A better approach would be to eliminate the symbols, and place the percentage and cost closer together so the user can review them as a pair, with national figures placed closer to each for comparison.
November 3, 2008, 3:48 pm
Microsoft Chart Advisor — Consider the Source
by Mac McBurney
The prototype Chart Advisor for Excel 2007 from Office Labs sounds like a step in the right direction:
This add-in uses an advanced rules engine to scan your data and, based on predefined rules, displays charts according to score. Top scoring charts are available for you to preview, tweak, and insert into your Excel worksheet.
An early post by Program Manager Scott Ruble describes the Excel team’s motivations, which at first glance seem admirable. On second thought, Ruble’s understated description of the group’s noble “intent” and responsiveness to strong feedback reminded me not to get my hopes up. (Emphasis and sarcastic comments added by me):
When Office 2007 was released [and not before then?], one of the strong pieces of feedback was Excel needs to do a better job guiding users in the proper selection of charts to effectively communicate their data. Though it wasn’t our intent [I feel so much better now], some of the new [and the old] formatting options [and defaults] such as glow and legacy 3D charts can [only] be used inappropriately, which obscure[sic] the meaning of a chart. Some people [silly, silly people] felt that these features contributed to creating more “chart junk.” In an effort to improve this situation, we have created a prototype called the Chart Advisor.
Mr. Ruble is being too modest. The new features and default settings — like the old features and default settings — guarantee more chart junk. This team wasn’t born on the day Office 2007 was released — quite the opposite. Saying that inappropriate use and obscuring the meaning of a chart was not the team’s intent seems, frankly, laughable.
I expect an upgrade from Microsoft to include new features — new things that users could do. Giving good advice about what a user should do is more difficult and risky, and it would ultimately be much more valuable. This is ambitious, and let’s hope it signals a greater focus on improving the real-world capabilities of Excel users, not just increasing the capabilities of the Excel software.
So far, Chart Advisor is in no danger of becoming an artificial Edward Tufte inside Excel. The add-in still serves a side order of chartjunk with your data.
Tim Mays reported that Chart Advisor ignored a whole column of source data and then (not surprisingly) recommended the wrong chart type. At first, Excel guru Jon Peltier didn’t even get that far.
Hey, that “advanced rules engine” is just a prototype. (More on the rules engine). If the wizards at Microsoft succeed in upgrading Excel’s brain, here’s hoping they have the courage to give it a heart and good taste as well.
October 31, 2008, 10:51 am
Dynamic Diagrams Poster Part of Award-Winning Conference Presentation
by Mac McBurney
Congratulations to Colette Hannan on winning the Young Scientist Award for best poster presentation at the 17th International Conference of Racing Analysts and Veterinarians. Colette won the award for her presentation, “Controlling therapeutic substances – a European harmonised approach: Determination of the detection time for lidocaine following an administration to horses.”
Dynamic Diagrams designed posters for five research studies conducted by BHP Labs in Limerick, Ireland, where Colette works as a chemist. The studies tracked how long drugs like lidocaine and morphine remain — or remain detectable — in race horses. These drugs are legitimate veterinary medications, but they’re a big no-no if your horse tests positive on race day.
The posters present research data and findings to a scientific audience, so we retained the organizing principles of a scientific poster or paper (methods, results, conclusions). In the central graphs, a circular blow-up shows the data of greatest interest. A timeline down the center shows when blood and urine samples were collected from the horses.
October 16, 2008, 11:08 am
The Cortical Homonculus
by Henry Woodbury
I recently came across two classic examples of visual explanation: neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield’s two-dimensional map of brain functions and its three-dimensional cohort, the cortical homonculus:
A cortical homunculus is a physical representation of the primary motor cortex, i.e., the portion of the human brain directly responsible for the movement and exchange of sense and motor information (namely touch: sensitivity, cold, heat, pain etc.) of the rest of the body.
More information about brain function and Penfield’s maps can be found here.
September 25, 2008, 3:48 pm
The Wire Meets 43F
by Tim Roy
One of my all-time favorite television series is “The Wire” and one of my all-time favorite blogs is Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders. Imagine my joy at finding that Merlin has written an extensive posting on “The Wire” as a close-to-perfect example of how a story arc should be constructed.
Here at Dynamic Diagrams, we spend a lot of time talking with our clients about visual story-telling. Part of this involves developing a narrative arc that allows an audience to connect to the story being told. Cognitive issues come into play here — establishing tension and then release, as well as providing the necessary “rests” so as not to create information overload.
Merlin writes: “…you very much do have the power to design the arcs you make, starting today. And even if you haven’t figured out how your final episode ends, consider how the pieces you want to lay down might fit together. And how the string that you gather might crack a case you hadn’t expected.”
If your own work is missing a narrative arc, take a look at The Wire: Writing Into Your Arc.
To quote Omar: “I’ll do what I can to help y’all. But, the game’s out there, and it’s play or get played. That simple.”
September 5, 2008, 10:16 am
Political Word Clouds
by Henry Woodbury
Both The New York Times and the Belmont Club blog have a feature today on the frequency of certain words in recent political speeches in the U.S. presidential race. Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club compares Sarah Palin’s Republican Convention speech to John McCain’s while the Times compares Democrats to Republicans with an additional breakdown of key words by politician.
The word count analysis reveals a few surprises, such as the fact that the Democrats were more likely to mention their opponent’s name than the Republicans. But word count analysis lacks context. If an opponent’s name is not mentioned, it may be because the opponent is better known, or referenced in other ways. It is, perhaps, the combination of words that matters, as indicators of key themes and rhetorical style.
September 5, 2008, 8:31 am
Google Chrome Comic Overshadows Product?
by Kirsten Robinson
It seems like everyone’s talking about the Google Chrome announcement — yeah, that’s right, the announcement, maybe more so than Chrome itself! In case your network connection has been down the last couple of days, the announcement is in the form of a comic book illustrated by Scott McCLoud, author of Understanding Comics. Here’s a sample:
And, in the “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” department, the spoofers (warning: adult content) weren’t far behind:
Anyway, it’s the first time I’ve read most of a 38-page product announcement in a long time. Although, I would have put the information with broadest appeal first (about the UI) and the developer-focused information last. And a progress indicator (“page 1 of 38″) wouldn’t hurt.
August 25, 2008, 9:55 am
Designing a Better Ballot
by Henry Woodbury
Debates about voting access often focus on the way votes are tallied: paper vs. electronic; touchscreen vs. optical scan. But a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law asserts that consistent design and clear instructions are possibly more important than technology:
When it comes to ensuring that votes are accurately recorded and tallied, there is a respectable argument that poor ballot design and confusing instructions have resulted in far more lost votes than software glitches, programming errors, or machine breakdowns. As this report demonstrates, poor ballot design and instructions have caused the loss of tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of votes in nearly every election year.
The report, Better Ballots (PDF), emphatically states the importance of good design — and good design practices, such as usability testing:
Usability testing is the best way to make sure that voters can use the ballot successfully, confident that they actually voted for the candidates and positions they intended to vote for. Usability testing allows election officials to observe individual voters using a ballot — before the election — in order to see where they have problems. This allows election officials to analyze the design and language choices to determine the cause of those problems. They can then redesign and rewrite the ballot to eliminate those problems — before the election. Unfortunately, the vast majority of jurisdictions do not conduct usability testing of their ballots before an election. Of course, all ballots will eventually receive a usability test — on Election Day. At that point, unfortunately, finding out that a ballot is confusing to voters is most unwelcome news.
June 24, 2008, 12:15 am
Your Risk of Death, Annotated
by Mac McBurney
Update (27 June): The comments posted by Wired Science readers are an amazing case study in information design, how well-intentioned readers get confused, limitations of the Google Motion Chart. I chronicled my own confusion and suggestions on a screen shot.
Wired Science wants to know if a Google Motion Chart helps explain that smoking could kill you. So far, you only includes men born between 1933 and 1973, but that’s not what makes the interactive graph confusing.
Author Alexis Madrigal chose to experiment with this data set, “because the researchers had the stated goal of presenting health-risk data in ways that could let people see the true risks associated with smoking.”
Comments on the blog point out a variety of confusing bits and suggest ways to improve this particular plot and the Google Motion Chart in general.
May 5, 2008, 2:05 pm
Harvard Business Review Discovers “Emerging Science of Visualization”
by Mac McBurney
Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, the two best-known creators of IBM Research’s Many Eyes, brief business execs on the benefits of collaborative information visualization.
Our research has found that the compelling presentation of data through visualization’s advanced techniques generates a surprising volume of impassioned conversations. Viewers ask questions, make comments, and suggest theories for why there’s a downward trend here or a data cluster there. That level of engagement could foster the kind of grassroots innovation CEOs dream of.
The article is available in the May 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review and for free online (at least for now):
You’ll also find Viégas and Wattenberg in MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition.
- History Flow, their 2003 visualization of changes in Wikipedia: http://moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/106
- Thinking Machine 4, by Wattenberg and Marek Walczak, shows a computer’s possible future chess moves. http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/283/
Finally, for even more info-vis star-watching, Viégas and two other designers will join John Maeda (an info design rockstar if ever there was one) later this month for IN/VISIBLE: Graphic Data Revealed. From the event’s blurb:
The visual ethics required in information graphics increase the designer’s burden from faithful executor to editorial arbiter. How do design choices affect the integrity of the data being portrayed?
If you see me there, say hello: http://www.aigany.org/events/details/08FD/
April 4, 2008, 12:18 pm
Forget the Parachutes and Cheese: Meet Johnny Bunko
by Lisa Agustin
Many information architects and designers are familiar with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which explains the mechanics of the medium while shedding light on the principles of visual communications. Now comes Daniel Pink’s new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, a graphic novel that claims to be “The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.” The book follows the protagonist as he learns the six secrets to a satisfying career, courtesy of a sprite named Diana who can be conjured by splitting a pair of magic chopsticks. (I’m not kidding.) The book is written in the Japanese style of comics called Manga. Why? According to Pink:
Because most career books just plain stink. They’re too long, too boring, and too quickly outdated. Today most people get their tactical career information online — how to write a resume, what questions to ask in an interview, who to use as a reference, etc. What they want in a book, or so people tell me, are what they can’t get from Google. They want strategic lessons — and they want it presented in an accessible, to-the-point way.
It’s an interesting approach, newer in the U.S. than in Japan where, Pink claims, 22% of all printed material is in Manga, covering topics as diverse as “how to help you manage your time, learn about Japanese history, or find a mate.” Will the format work? You decide.
April 2, 2008, 8:58 am
Where the Singles Are
by Henry Woodbury
Author and researcher Richard Florida tells us where single men and women outnumber each other with a map and accompanying essay (originally published in The Boston Globe). The blog reprint gives commenters a chance to get into the discussion.
Tom kicks off the comment thread with a decisive point:
I think this map would be more informative if it was based on percentages rather than raw numbers.
One hopes Florida will respond. As he chatters on about the extreme cases of “greater New York” and “greater Los Angeles” I look at his map and wonder about Memphis and Miami. Why does greater Memphis, with a population around one million, have a greater singles-gender imbalance than Miami-Ft. Lauderdale with a population about five times that?
March 18, 2008, 9:32 pm
User Experience: Crash Test Version
by Henry Woodbury
One exhibit at the New York Auto show is a car like this:
The point is to show off the Ford Taurus’s five star crash rating. What makes this interesting as information design is that it’s literally a) a car crash and b) interactive:
Show goers will be allowed to sit in the post-crash Taurus to see what a crash test dummy sees after a 35-mph meet up with an offset concrete barrier.
It is easy to forget in the online world, but the best user experience is being there.
February 27, 2008, 1:06 pm
The Movie Money Landscape
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times has a very nice interactive chart on The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts 1986 – 2007, partially captured below:
This visual explanation does many some things well. It uses both sides of the horizontal axis to double the amount of data displayed in a vertical slice of time. It avoids unnecessary gridlines and tick marks. It uses color to clarify the area plot for “total domestic gross” allowing easier comparison between movies with short and long runs (compare Shrek to Hannibal, for example). A “Find Movie” feature helps locate any release in the time frame and highlight it among its contemporaries.
All that is missing is a single view of the entire chart. Even a static thumbnail image would help illustrate seasonal and macro trends. Here’s a sample view of 1986 – 1990.
Update: Thanks to commenter “tomp” I’ve made a few edits. My original “double the amount of data” statement was off base. By using both sides of the horizontal axis, the chart may increase the number of peaks, but since the data is stacked (not overlapping as I originally assumed), this technique does not increase data density. The macro view would, in fact, be much easier to analyze if all the data was stacked in the same direction (upwards). I also replaced a reference to The Animal with Hannibal so that my point about total domestic gross would actually make sense.
January 9, 2008, 4:06 pm
Nightingale’s Rose
by Henry Woodbury
Two ways of reading the word area — its general vs. its mathematical meaning — leads to confusion in this otherwise superb article on Charts in the Economist. The chart in question is Florence Nightingale’s “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army of the East.” The data is plotted by month in 30-degree wedges. In each month, red represents deaths by injury, blue death by disease, and black death by other causes:
The Economist explains how to interpret the diagram:
As with today’s pie charts, the area of each wedge is proportional to the figure it stands for, but it is the radius of each slice (the distance from the common centre to the outer edge) rather than the angle that is altered to achieve this.
Herein lies the confusion. In fact, the areas of the wedges are not proportional. The data actually maps to the radius of each wedge. It appears that in her annotation, Nightingale used the word area in the generic sense of section or range. The great sweep of blue around the center of each chart is an artifact of the unusual radial plot. Perhaps unintentionally, Nightingale overdramatized the facts that made her case.
Our Creative Director, Piotr Kaczmarek, recalibrated Nightingale’s chart to correct this error. The diagram below uses all the elements of the original, but makes the data proportional to area:
Nightingale’s diagram, often referred to as Nightingale’s Rose or Nightingale’s Coxcomb, represents one of the inherent risks in visual explanation. An image may be so visually interesting — so iconic (a rose, a coxcomb) — that we assume its conclusions without examining its data.
This is better: a stacked bar chart that introduces a scale (!), more readable labels, and a single chart for the entire 1854-1856 period. These changes provide context and continuity, and make clear the two campaigns of the war:
UPDATE: In the comments, hstern recommends separating the three data types to allow better comparison. As it happens, Piotr created that chart as one of his alternatives to the radial plot. I’ve uploaded it below.
December 6, 2007, 11:30 am
Foodpairing Diagrams
by Lisa Agustin
The Foodpairing web site takes a scientific approach to recipe creation. Diagrams of 250 ingredients show the major flavor components of each using a series of branches where ingredients with shorter distances between them have more in common. By selecting a flavor from each branch of the product diagram, the chef creates new and tasty combinations:
“If I want to reconstruct the basil flavour without using any basil…search for a combination of other food products where one contains linalool (like coriander), one contains estragol (like tarragon), etc…. So I can reconstruct basil by combining coriander, tarragon, cloves, laurel.”
It’s an interesting idea, making innovation in cooking less of a guessing game and more systematic.
December 4, 2007, 7:23 pm
Online Chart Chooser for Excel and PowerPoint
by Mac McBurney
No time to kick tires and sing praises at the moment, just a quick tip o’ the hat to the folks at Juice Analytics. Nicely done.
November 28, 2007, 3:18 pm
Improving Excel Charts
by Kirsten Robinson
Recently I was preparing a presentation for a client to summarize the findings from a survey. I was frustrated with the appearance of the default charts from Excel — ugly colors, slanted labels, a scale that went to an impossible 120%, and various other bits of chart junk got in the way of the data. After experimenting with formatting options, I was able to improve the appearance. Here’s what I changed:
And here is the final chart:
If you’d like to try this yourself, you can find these formatting options by right-clicking on different parts of the chart. You can also modify settings in the chart wizard while creating the chart.
Now, if only I could save my preferences to use in future charts.
In case you were wondering, the survey question was, “How do you currently use the Web for teaching?” Teachers could select any or all of the five options. I converted the scale from raw numbers to percent of respondents to normalize the results between middle and high school teachers.
October 4, 2007, 1:28 pm
Visualizing Digg
by Lisa Agustin
Making sense of the activity on Digg is the mission behind Digg Labs. The Labs offer four different views of Digg data: Arc (shown at left), BigSpy, Stack, and Swarm. Like the Digg site itself, each visualization tracks similar information, including the newest stories that users “digg,” story popularity (number and frequency of “diggs”), and the names of “diggers” themselves. Best of all, the visualizations are in real-time, making the energy and behavior of the Digg community a palpable one. But while the tools give a new perspective on Digg activity, they fall short on helping users see any obvious patterns or draw specific conclusions. Some critics even consider them confusing. Despite the criticism, these data visualizations have provided direction on how to improve the Digg user experience, according to Digg creative director Daniel Burka:
“After seeing users congregate around stories and examining their relationships, we’ve tweaked our algorithms to take [content] diversity into account when determining how popular a story really is,” Burka says. This allows a wider range of subjects to show up on the home page, for example. “Many of the lessons we’ve learned in the Labs are also influencing future feature development and the general direction of the site.”
An article in Technology Review offers further details on Digg Labs: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19079/?a=f
August 13, 2007, 11:27 am
Timeline and Timeplot: Open Source Tools from MIT
by Mac McBurney
Two cool ways to display events and overlay data on a timeline, from the SIMILE group at MIT. Just add XML.
“Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.” Be sure to check out the filtering and highlighting functions in the Dinosaurs example.
http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/
Timeplot is newer (maybe buggier) and allows additional data to be plotted on a timeline.
August 13, 2007, 11:11 am
Many Eyes
by Mac McBurney
This project from IBM’s Alphaworks is like Flickr for information visualizations. Warning: Contents may be addicting (especially for readers of Information Design Watch).
From the site: “Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.” Hear, hear!
Post a data set, then choose one of the predefined visualization types. Or, let other users find clever ways to graph the data. Browse “topic hubs,” post comments and ratings, save your favorites to a watch-list. You get the idea. On the horizon: ordinary users can post visualizations, not just data. The possibilities are even more dazzling than the work so far.
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home
July 24, 2007, 9:59 am
Visualizing Network Dynamics
by Lisa Agustin
The submissions from this year’s Visualizing Network Dynamics competition (part of the larger NetSci07 meeting) represent an intriguing collection of the different ways to represent the complex structures of dynamic networks. A mix of both movies and still visualizations covering a wide range of subjects, including citation pathways in BioMed Central, ideological alliances on the Supreme Court, and editing patterns on Wikipedia (above), the entrants all set about to map real world networks that are dynamically evolving over time in response to their usage. This year’s winner was Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns Movie, an animation of North American flight travel paths based on aircraft data collected by the Federal Aviation Administration. Set to music, this hypnotic visualization offers insights on multiple levels, including the environmental. According to one of the competition’s judges: “In an age of climatic crisis and carbon footprints, the [patterns] are rhetorically powerful as ecological visualizations showing the almost absurd degree of mobility in the USA.”
July 13, 2007, 3:50 pm
Graph Design I.Q. Test at Perceptual Edge
by Kirsten Robinson
Stephen Few at Perceptual Edge has posted a Graph Design I.Q. Test. It’s not difficult, but it does make you stop and think about your past sins…. Who among us has not been tempted by Excel’s 3D capabilities?
May 10, 2007, 9:09 pm
Hyperbolic Views: Mapping the Blogosphere
by Mac McBurney
Discover Magazine discusses a series of maps of the blogosphere created by Matthew Hurst.
Discussion of the pros and cons will have to wait for another day. Until then, here are two more hyperbolic tree visualization examples:
Interactive Tree View of the LexisNexis Directory of Online Sources
National Science Digital Library
Tell us what you think.
April 16, 2007, 8:28 pm
If Tufte made a music video…
by Mac McBurney
Since I’m on a Tufte jag…
First, frequent commenter EB pointed us to discussion of a vaguely Tufte-esque video. This week our own Matt DeMeis sees and raises with a link to Le Grand Content. What’s next, a Best Parody of Information Design category at the Video Music Awards?
April 16, 2007, 2:15 pm
On Tufte and Napoleon’s March
by Mac McBurney
In February, the Dynamic Diagrams staff made a field trip (some might say pilgrimage) to Edward Tufte’s day-long seminar, “Presenting Data and Information.” If you’ve ever heard of Edward Tufte, you have probably seen Napoleon’s March to Moscow, Charles Josef Minard’s visual explanation of Napoleon’s disastrous attempt to conquer Russia in 1812.
Tufte says, “it may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” The graphic appears repeatedly in Tufte’s books, posters and brochures. At the recent seminar, I realized that the image has become a defacto corporate logo of Tufte and Graphics Press. At the seminar, the graphic was used in a sign directing participants from the hotel lobby to the upstairs lecture hall. It worked: Napoleon’s March quickly caught my eye and confirmed I was headed in the right direction.
Conventional wisdom v. six-variable masterpiece of information design
Because Napoleon’s March is so innovative, so lauded, so pervasive in Edwardtufteland and so emblematic of Tufte’s teachings, it was (I’m chagrined to admit) not easy for me to see that it undermines, rather than supports, the conventional view of the historical events. (Thanks to Piotr, creative director at d/D, for leading the way.)
Minard created his map to show the horrors of war. Tufte uses it to explain grand principles of data display. Both are succeessful, but Tufte misses an opportunity to emphasize just how powerful Minard’s graphic is. Tufte repeats the popular belief that “General Winter” defeated Napoleon’s army. I haven’t studied the history since high school, but this fits the image that sticks in my head: soldiers freezing to death.
In fact, according to Minard’s map, nearly three times as many French soldiers were lost (never mind the Russians) before the retreat and before the coldest weather. 90,000 died on the retreat–horrible to be sure — but 250,000 were lost before that. Only because the map follows Tufte’s grand principle number one, show the data, are we able to really question the conventional wisdom, ask useful questions and formulate alternate narratives. Now that I’m re-thinking my own understanding, I wonder why Tufte even mentions General Winter as the moral of the story.
Recency bias
In addition to temperature itself and the impending threat of winter, I suspect another factor strengthens the prevailing interpretation: recency bias. Only ten thousand French soldiers lived to tell the tale. They had just endured three months of immense suffering and witnessed the deaths of 90,000 comrades (90% of the retreating force). It’s hard to imagine their state of mind, but the previous summer was probably a distant memory.
January 23, 2007, 6:29 pm
Politically Convenient Misunderstanding
by Mac McBurney
Aircraft noise in your neighborhood could increase by almost 1000 percent! Are you scared yet?
Call it the politics of ear.
Late last year, a map of suburban Philadelphia — using data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) — became a hot topic among citizens and candidates for local office. The map estimates how “noise levels” would change if the FAA approves new flight patterns in the area. Zip Code areas are color-coded on a scale from negative 56% to 925% increase. Not surprisingly, citizens were concerned and politicians made much of the dramatic statistic. What does 925% more noise sound like? Perish the thought!
No one questions the underlying FAA data change in decibels. The issue here is not accuracy, but validity. It turns out that the decibel is not a valid measure of the sensation you or I would call noise. Noisiness is mostly in your head, as much a function of perception as physics.
The student newspaper at Swarthmore College makes the confusion clear:
While the decibel is used to measure the relative difference in power or intensity, the sone is the unit of loudness as perceived by a person with normal hearing. Some people who examined the maps provided by the Delaware County Planning Department erroneously interpreted the projected increase in decibels as equivalent to a linear increase in noise level.
A Swarthmore engineering professor brought the misinterpretation to light a few weeks before election day, but the sensational misinterpretation had already spread far and wide. Plus, “1000 percent” just sounds so much more electable than, well, the truth. When did the map makers finally correct the error? Two days after the county election.
Local parent and partisan Daddy Democrat gives it the sniff test:
Given that [candidate] Tom Gannon had essentially staked his entire re-election bid on his stance on the FAA…he needed that data to be overwhelmingly bad. Rep. Gannon continued to claim that the potential noise increase would be upwards of 1000% — even in the final days before the election. Even though the error had been pointed out weeks before. It just doesn’t get people worked up into sufficient lather if you say that there might be 10-90% increases in noise levels. 90% is not 1000%, even though it may be damned loud.
I don’t want more planes flying over my head. And I expect my representatives to protect our local interests to the fullest extent possible. But I also don’t like flouting the truth about data.
Check out the revised maps on the Delaware County site. If the decibels and sones maps don’t quench your thirst for confusing information design, don’t miss the one called “Percentage Increase/Decrease in Population Already Highly Annoyed by Aircraft Noise.”
January 3, 2007, 4:23 pm
Paper Cuts and System Interfaces
by Chris Jackson
Visual and performance artist Peter Calleson explores multiple layers of meaning in his papercut works to explore the complexities between 2D and 3D presentation. I’m drawn to the beauty and cleverness of the works, but I’m most intrigued by how these works exist between two opposites or, as Callesen puts it, between “image and reality.”
I can’t look at Callesen’s papercut works and not think about the intersection between systems and interfaces, how what’s beneath the surface influences what’s above (and vice versa). If you look at one side only, you miss the complexity of the whole. And that’s one of the great challenges in system design.
September 20, 2006, 4:37 pm
How to Generate New Ideas
by Henry Woodbury
Statistician Seth Roberts, “best selling author and paragon of scientific self-experimentation,” is the feature of a link-rich blog post by Tyler Cowen, titled How to Be Happy. What struck me, upon following several links, was Roberts’ interest in idea generation. The “how to be happy” link leads to an unpublished paper titled “Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight.” Even better is the first section of this paper: Three Things Statistics Textbooks Don’t Tell You (PDF). Roberts writes:
Statistics textbooks usually discuss graphic displays of data, but the stated goal is presentation, not idea generation (e.g., Howell, 1999). This reflects the statistics literature, where sophistication and enthusiasm about graphics usually concern presentation (e.g., Gelman, Pasarica, & Dodhia, 2002; Schmid, 1983). Tufte’s (1983, 1990) lovely books, for example, are entirely about presentation; nothing is said about idea generation.
What Roberts found through his own experiments should resonate with anyone who communicates visually:
A major reason for graphing one‘s data [is that a] tiny fraction of one‘s graphs will suggest new lines of research.
Or, to repeat his quote of statistician John Tuckey:
The picture-examining eye is the best finder we have of the wholly unanticipated.
When developing visual explanations we think in terms of the information we want to clarify, the story we want to tell, the audience we want to engage. What goes unmentioned is the fact that moving from text and numbers to visuals can change the way we think about our overall concept. Sometimes a visual explanation suggests powerful alternatives for further exploration. Sometimes we realize that the data doesn’t support the stated goals of the project and a new approach is needed.
While our own process model involves extensive research and analysis, we have learned to begin drafting visual ideas as soon as we have any applicable information to work with. Iterative thumbnails and sketches do more than illustrate the research. They themselves are analytical tools that help us (and our clients) steer clear of blind alleys and drive toward more persuasive, innovative visual results.
July 11, 2006, 2:24 pm
Applying Open Source to the Realm of Font Design
by Lisa Agustin
Considered primarily an approach to programming, the “open source” method is now being applied to the unlikely area of font design, specifically for Linux.
Open source type design is not a completely new idea. In 2003, a font family called Vera was developed for open-source use. Under the license terms, anyone was permitted to make new fonts based on Vera, as long as the derivatives were given a different name. The latest effort in this movement is tied to DejaVu, a Vera derivative that has sparked the interest of different Linux players:
DejaVu has caught on widely enough for it to be the default font for Dapper Drake, the latest update to Ubuntu Linux. It may also become the default font for Red Hat’s Fedora version of Linux.
“DejaVu, from purely a user perspective, seems to be the one that has the momentum and benefits behind it,” said Rahul Sundaram, one of nine board members for the Fedora Project, which governs the Linux version.
Taking a collaborative approach to type design has been particularly helpful in addressing practical concerns for making fonts, such as the creation of special characters or glyphs for other languages:
In the software world, creating a new offshoot is called “forking.” The freedom to do so is one hallmark of an open-source project. Several designers launched their own Vera forks… The designers had initially created limited extensions to include Western languages such as Welsh or Catalan, then later took on larger and more ambitious extensions, such as Greek and Cyrillic.
The renewed interest in improving this aspect of Linux goes beyond improving typeface presentation for its own sake–it demonstrates that elements of the user interface are just as important as performance factors in offering Linux as an alternative to the Windows operating system.
June 19, 2006, 4:30 pm
DesignBusinessArchitectural Thinking
by Mac McBurney
This recent Business Week article calls Patrick Whitney, director of the Institute of Design (ID) at IIT in Chicago, a design visionary.
Traditionally, design education is based on visual expression, and students learn through drawing, model making, and studying the work of other designers. That is still the case in most design schools. Little emphasis is placed on how design fits into a business context.
Whitney pioneered a completely different model. The ID curriculum focuses directly on design strategy and innovation. Some 80% of the school’s courses don’t involve making things. User Observation & Early Prototyping aims at understanding consumers’ wants, the crux of the innovation gap. In New Product Development, students also learn how to read a balance sheet. In Design Languages, they learn how to make effective business presentations. In Systems Design, students look at designing business organizations…“Most designers don’t understand business,” says John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. “Patrick has done more than anyone in crossing this chasm.”
ID graduates and faculty made a strong impression on me at ID’s Chicago neighbor Doblin (www.doblin.com). On ethnographic research and innovation projects, designers combined forces with (for example) anthopologists from the University of Chicago and MBAs from Kellogg. Now, in addition to educating innovation-savvy designers, ID now offers a dual Master’s degree with IIT’s business school. From ID’s web site:
The first program of its kind in the world, IIT’s MDes/MBA marks an important milestone in the co-evolution of design, management, and innovation. As design becomes regarded more and more as an essential business resource, professional education that links the two fields is becoming increasingly important.
Could a triple-Master’s degree, adding anthropology or social psychology, be next? Whether companies acquire these skill sets by forming interdisciplinary teams, or by hiring a single cross-trained individual, more companies seem to be waking up to the benefits.
Unfortunately, Business Week applies a caricature of business schools to over-hype an already important point.
Corporations have traditionally mined the best B-Schools for by-the-numbers managerial talent. But who really wants to hire people with masters degrees in “administration” when today’s business culture demands managers who can master the process of innovation.
Historically, b-schools may come by their stereotype honestly, but equating today’s top MBA programs with a 1950s-style “degree in ‘administration’” isn’t fair. More importantly, it’s unnecessary. Programs like the one at ID are newsworthy and valuable even by today’s standards.
For their part, many business schools are offering courses on innovation and contextual research methods along side the finance and economics. What ID would call design thinking, Toronto’s Rotman School of Management calls “integrative thinking.” This is more than another business buzzword: Rotman’s integrative thinking pages contain seminar notes, videotaped speeches by Malcolm Gladwell and Jack Welch, as well as a coherent, detailed explanation of the term. See also: ID’s collection of research and ideas.
June 19, 2006, 1:01 pm
Who Are We Designing For, Anyway?
by Lisa Agustin
Consumers? Customers? Users? These are the words that we’ve grown accustomed to using when referring to the person who will benefit from the latest object or information we’ve designed. According to author Don Norman, these are derogatory terms that continue to look at the (pardon us) end user from the company-centered perspective. Says Norman, why not look at them for what they really are — People:
If we are designing for people, why not call them that: people, a person, or perhaps humans. But no, we distance ourselves from the people for whom we design by giving them descriptive and somewhat degrading names, such as customer, consumer, or user. Customer — you know, someone who pays the bills. Consumer — one who consumes. User, or even worse, end user — the person who pushes the buttons, clicks the mouse, and keeps getting confused.
The related terminology is no less impersonal, since these users–in their various “roles”–”perform tasks” to get “results” and hopefully avoid “errors” in the process. Norman’s suggestion to “wipe out words such as consumer, customer, and user from our vocabulary” may not be possible; rather, the takeaway for designers should be to strive for an understanding of and empathy for those who will hopefully benefit from well-designed information or products.
June 16, 2006, 2:29 pm
Design Does Not Get More Hands On Than This
by Henry Woodbury
Remember subliminal advertising? A Time.com article on “menu engineer” Gregg Rapp details the totally visible design tricks a restaurant will use to steer patrons to higher profit selections:
The way prices are listed is very important. “This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get wrong,” he explains. “If all the prices are aligned on the right, then I can look down the list and order the cheapest thing.” It’s better to have the digits and dollar signs discreetly tagged on at the end of each food description. That way, the customer’s appetite for honey-glazed pork will be whetted before he sees its cost.
One ongoing difficulty in the design business is quantifying return. This is not so for Rapp:
Rapp is so sure of his menu makeovers that he offers a money-back guarantee that his menu will raise profits–and in his 25 years in the business, he has yet to issue a refund.
June 8, 2006, 1:25 pm
Bar Graphs at Em Height
by Henry Woodbury
In his forthcoming book, Beautiful Evidence (2006), Edward R. Tufte explores the idea of “sparklines,” simple graphs whose y-axis is scaled to the height of a line of text. A draft chapter of Beautiful Evidence provides many examples of the concept and is accompanied by additional comments from Tufte and others.
I came across sparklines on David Pinto’s Baseball Musings site, where he has recently experimented with text-height graphs for such data sets as strikeouts per game (Jason Schmidt) and hits per game (Joe Mauer vs. Alex Rios).
Pinto credits Joe Gregorio who created the Baseball Musings sparklines on his online image generator. Gregorio, in turn, links to Tufte.
April 20, 2006, 3:06 pm
The PowerPoint Minimalist
by Henry Woodbury
We recently came across Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen, a superb blog on presentation design. With entries like “Learning from the World of Judo” and “2-D or not 2-D? (That is the question)”, Reynolds offers a wealth of quirky but eminently usable advice.
As his blog title suggests, Reynolds is an advocate of clarity and restraint. In one of his popular posts, “What is good PowerPoint design?” he examines how simplicity in design must be driven by context, not formula:
Simplicity is often used as a means to greater clarity. However, simplicity can also be viewed as a consequence. A consequence, that is, of our careful efforts to craft a story and create supporting visuals that focus on our audience’s needs in a clear and meaningful way.
In another post, Reynolds contrasts the presentation styles of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, in amusing form:
Mr. Gates needs to read Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points, ironically published by Microsoft Press…
March 17, 2006, 9:22 am
What is Information Design, Again?
by d/D
The Design Council, a UK organization that advocates good design, provides a lot of cross-disciplinary information on its sprawling Web site. If you need to reaquaint yourself with the meaning of information design or explain it to colleagues, take a look at Sue Walker and Mark Barratt’s About: Information Design article. For example, here the two explain the relationship between information design and information architecture:
“Information designers order and structure information on behalf of users. The information architect — a new role created by large websites and information systems — is part information designer, part information scientist, part information systems professional. They create the order, taxonomies and navigation interfaces that allow us to use today’s million-page websites efficiently.”
With sections like “Why it matters to business,” “Why it matters to public,” “Examples,” “Facts and Quotes,” and so forth, the article offers a number of entry points for different audiences.
Our own white paper Information Architecture for Web Sites can be found here:
April 7, 2005, 1:27 pm
Game Flows and Shot Charts
by d/D
The sports pages have long inspired dense presentations of information, most uniquely in the form of the box score. Now, many online sports venues are turning statistics into interactive charts and visuals. Consider the “Game Flow” chart in this recap of the recent NCAA Division I College Basketball Championship (scroll down and mouse over):
http://sports-att.espn.go.com/ncb/recap?gameId=254000063
Another example is the interactive shot chart that ESPN creates for each National Basketball Association game:
March 11, 2005, 2:03 pm
Learning Objects Online
by d/D
“Learning objects” are self-contained content modules that educators may use independently, add to lectures, or aggregate into a broader course of study. At Wesleyan University, a dedicated team is using the Internet as a distribution medium for multimedia-based modules:
“We are working with faculty to develop interactive learning tools and animations that will help students understand difficult concepts. These modules can be shared across campus, with faculty at other institutions and be used both inside and outside of the classroom.”
http://learningobjects.wesleyan.edu/
The team’s projects show the range of possibilities, from an interactive map of the temples of Palenque to a simulation of protein synthesis.
http://learningobjects.wesleyan.edu/palenque/map/map_high.html
http://learningobjects.wesleyan.edu/proteinsynthesis/flash.html (Flash)
February 11, 2005, 2:10 pm
Editing as History
by d/D
InfoWorld’s Jon Udell has a fascinating analysis of how a collectively edited Wikipedia article, “Heavy metal umlaut”, changed over time. Udell provides a voice over for a series of screen shots that show the evolution of the article’s content and organization. His discussion also covers several different attempts to place umlauts over various letters (specifically the letter “n” in “Spinal Tap”) and an incident of vandalism (WARNING: includes obscene language).
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html (NOTE: Scroll down if you do not see the audio controls when the page first loads.)
March 9, 2004, 9:26 am
A “Call to Action” from the Year 2000
by d/D
Looking back, it’s interesting to contrast Clare Hart’s comments described here with an article in the April 1, 2000 issue of CIO Magazine. “Call to Action” describes the importance of “actionable” information, information “distilled to its essence and organized so that it gets its meaning across effortlessly.”
“But the truth is, companies are painfully short of actionable information, and their CIOs are not using information design practices to create it. In spite of the fact that IT leaders rate actionable information important for decision making –4.8 out of 5, on average — most are not on a track to get there.
While Hart focuses on technologies for visualizing data, “Call to Action” emphasizes the role of information designers. These two viewpoints reinforce each other. Tools for mining data simply gives information designers more opportunities to prioritize, condense, and illuminate.
March 9, 2004, 9:18 am
Angles on the Information Industry, 2004
by d/D
Information Today, Inc., has compiled a list of 2004 predictions from 11 captains of the information industry. The responses focus largely on technology and business issues, but there are some interesting remarks on information design practice, in particular, those of Clare Hart, President and CEO of Factiva:
“Text analytics and visualization technologies will further enrich the user experience in the decision-making process. Such technologies rapidly recognize associations among textual elements and can then present them graphically. This ability will permit executives to identify trends at the early stages of development or display material relationships that might signal customer, partner, or supplier activity. Acting quickly upon information will reduce risk and benefit the organization. Without these technologies, this information might otherwise be buried in a mountain of information that would be impossible to navigate.”
December 8, 2003, 9:49 am
A Map of the Internet: Art or Information?
by d/D
The value of maps and other visuals, even when generated by an information-gathering process, may be more artistic than informational:
“A project to create a comprehensive graphical representation of the Internet in just one day…has already produced some eye-catching images.”
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994434
The sheer complexity of some representations makes them hard to use analytically. By using labeling or filtering mechanisms, one can begin drawing information out of such complexity. In the instance of the Opte project described above, an option to display IP addresses along a traceroute (via a preset preference, or, for an interactive display, by mouseclick), would begin to make the Internet map more maplike. More information on the Opte project is at http://www.opte.org/.