Hot answers tagged info-visualisation
72
People who turn on the TV on election night expect to see the map of their country and see which states voted which way. Those who actually follow the elections and have at least some very basic knowledge of what's going on, also know which are the important states to watch, and they can find them easily on the geographic map. Even those who aren't that ...
33
What about taking a waveform resolved to stretch only a short distance, say 200px, then wrap it around a ring so it fits inside the square thumbnail constraints. So... length of waveform graph would be... related to pi somewhat.
Like this, which I made in photoshop using the polar coordinates command.
29
For anyone mathematically inclined, the answer is to use a log scale.
For non-mathematical people, you may be better off showing a break in the chart and then the extreme value.
28
Interesting graphic - the US looks quite funny. But I think a geographic representation is still best way because of:
The viewer is interested in what state has elected and which party. This is best shown in a geographical correct map as you are used to know where a state is situated.
It is obvious, that the USA is shown. No need for explaining a strange ...
24
A smooshed-up waveform doesn't seem very useful. For all practical purposes it's meaningless, and it'd be hard to tell two 180x180px waveforms apart at a glance. Instead you might consider a visual hash like Identicon. That would still be meaningless, but the thumbnails would be visually distinct. A clever algorithm could even make similar files (e.g. songs ...
22
The point is that the map is intended as an at-a-glance throwaway space filler that does it's job simply and efficiently and for all viewers.
Of course, that's not to say there's no place for maps with more information, but there's no point in doing that unless you can provide a way for the user to interact with the map in a meaningful manner that allows ...
19
The main problem non-technical users have with Boolean logic is understanding the difference between AND and OR because it doesn’t always correspond to natural language (e.g., “show me orders from New York and New Jersey” almost certainly means Location = NY OR Location = NJ). Often users tend to interpret "or" to be an an exclusive OR. Then there’s the ...
16
You could use logarithmic axes. This allows you to compactly visualize wide ranging variables.
To illustrate, here is a very simple logarithmic visualization:
6 942 535 341
23 598
419 203
8 201
3
The length of each datum represented as a number is (roughly) log_10 of that number. So just printing the numbers in a ...
15
I find just using the colors as the demarkation a bit harder to understand. You can use a vertical rule to act as a placeholder for the goal, YTD or annual, depending on the day.
Your focus should be the goal and how much over or under you are. What I mean is there is not enough value of showing the actual numbers when you are just bother to about the ...
14
I didn't understand whether by "chopping and stretching" you meant taking a segment of the audio data and stretching it so it fills the square, or rearranging it. The rearranging approach sounds like a good idea.
12
Your idea could work, but you will need to take care when designing it. Variable sizes can appear confusing. Breaking the balance and symmetry that often marks pleasing design.
However, it's not impossible. This experiment, called elastic lists provides an excellent example with several ideas.
Get the code: Github link for elastic lists
This is a bells ...
11
One problem I think you should avoid is auto-adjusting the other variables to maintain the 100% total. It can become extremely annoying to have to deal with that whenever there are more than 2 variables at play. And if you relax your restrictions a bit I think you can create a more user-friendly interface out of it.
I came up with a solution that's part ...
11
Definitely the 2nd option.
while some people may be interested in watching the video, those that do will probably only want to watch it once. Being presented with a welcome page every single time they visit the site would just annoy them.
Give them a page in the site where they can find the video, (even link to it on the homepage if it's important - but ...
11
The specific answer to your question is to go with the first solution. That is the standard cartographic convention, effectively eliminating the question of where, say, 50.5 goes. As far as where the exact category breaks go (say, precisely 50), it doesn’t matter. Users understand that that the categories are functionally fuzzy. For example, obviously 49.999 ...
10
Each type of graph or chart has a presentation purpose. You choose chart type depending on what you want to show and what parts of the data that you want to compare.
It is quite easy to just google "how to choose graph type". I found for example this Graphing Tutorial: How to choose which type of graph to use?
I summarize:
Use . . .
a Line ...
10
I've generally replace the space (where dashboard elements will live) with sample images. I grey them out and actually slap copy that says "Example Transactions" or "Example Data" ..what ever makes the most sense. That way your users aren't faced with big empty spaces and they become acclimatized to how the app will look with regular use.
Here's a couple ...
10
I think you have too quickly ruled out the most intuitive option.
Humans are especially good at recognizing faces, and I think you might be surprised how well you can represent the nine different states with 32x32 smileys.
For example, take a look at this group of smileys:
http://gas13.ru/v3/pixelart/smilies_by_gas13.png
or very simply:
...
10
From a UX perspective, there is no reason that the sum has to be 100. You may be thinking in terms of percentages, but it is trivial to scale them up or down to make the net effect 100.
What usually matters in weighting is the weight of a single item relative to the total weight. You can easily calculate this, so there is no need to burden a user with ...
10
I had a very similar problem recently, and did some user testing on it. The main thing that came out of it was that we should avoid colours that have a common meaning. So yellow was a bad option, and green represented 'good', not 'acceptable'.
In the end we used grey as the neutral background colour, blue as the progress for 'expectation'; green as ...
9
Try using a spiral heat map to visualise your data - these are excellent at helping you to spot temporal patterns. Your time dimension becomes a spiral, one rotation per year or month, and your other variables shown as a heat map.
TDWI has an interview with Biz2 founder Andrew Cardno where he talks about this approach.
Disclosure: Several years ago, I ...
9
Depending on the nature of data, you can use Tufte's Sparklines. This approach combines text, color and small graphics. Google Analytics makes use of this approach in their control panel:
9
Thumbnails are meant as a preview for identifying the object without getting into the details.
Using the wave form in a thumbnail would not help identify the audio track.
What you could do is:
Use a vocal thumbnail (e.g. 10sec preview) played on mouse over
Use a visual representation of the contents e.g. use a database or pre-identified and tagged ...
9
There is of course an awful lot of research on color and color perception. Most relevant to your purpose is perhaps the work Cynthia Brewer did on ColorBrewer. You can find the resulting tool at http://colorbrewer2.org/ It was originally designed to help choose color for maps but it can also be used for statistical graphs (it's built in Hadley Wickham's ...
9
I think going iconic is only going to add vagueness and detract from the value that a number gives you. Users are pretty good at scanning a column of numbers and interpreting them.
I'd suggest keep the ranking as an integer number. Put the 'out of' in the header of the table.
If you do actually have eighteen thousand companies, then consider whether the ...
9
Generally, showing both is a good move, because not everyone will easily be able to workout the site address from the email, and they might be different.
The length of the domain does not really impact this, I don;t think - you have to display it once on the business card, so a second time - often directly underneath - should be fine.
Is it necessary? No, ...
9
So, how do you define the minimum value?
Tuftes’ data density is really about three principles: (1) Above all else, show the data, (2) Maximize the data-ink ratio and (3) Erase non-data ink. In its extreme this could be interpreted as small as possible human could read. We’re talking about font-sizes as small as 3 pixels, but practically 5 pixels which ...
9
Creating a feature comparison chart similar to what you see for tiered hosting plans or software packages are great for this:
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
The advantage is you can let your eye move across the X and Y axis fairly quickly and it seems simple even though the relationships are fairly complex.
8
Hagan Rivers proposed a very useful model of representing a site's navigation during her presentation Escaping Navigation Hell, you should look into it. She says it's better to use an application map since the navigation system can be viewed as an application on itself that has the objective of taking you to the screen you need.
It's so much clearer than a ...
8
Please clarify: Team members handle multiple assignments in parallel?
Just a first idea: An "Week Overview" that scales well in size, so it can be used as a single-week view and as an overview of a quarter /many weeks.
Header shows week number, date range of that week, and indicates holidays in that week.
Mouse over "Holidays" will show which days
...
8
Well, they are in fact used in Google Analytics...
And when you're logged into wordpress, you'll see this in the bar at the top of a WP blog:
I think it's not a sparkline per se, but it's a similar concept.
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