Today with the web, the conditions have changed. We have technologies that enable new ways to store, collect and share large amount of data as well as the social web that generate tons of real time data, which implies a great mass of dynamic data to deal with. This means we don’t have the same control of the outcome as we had before when we worked with a limit static set of data.

With these new conditions it seems like the designer has shifted role from proving a point to create tools that makes it easy for people to discover and find their own stories. The tools are more about letting them navigate through and understand rich and varied flows of information, using their behavior as navigation. Instead of being a passive observer the user can participate in the exploration.

Here are some intriguing data visualization tools that put the user in the driver’s seat:

Stamen design, a small design and technology studio in San Francisco, work a lot with real time data and infographics. They created Trulia Snapshot that helps you localize homes for sale, and explore different variables like if it’s cheap, expensive, newest on the market, and longest on the market.

They also created Oakland Crimespotting, an interactive map of crimes in Oakland that helps people to sort and understand crime in cities. With this tool you can navigate hour by hour and over time.

Together with Small Batch Inc.  Jeffrey Veen has a few data visualization projects going on, one of them is Wikirank, a tool for exploring new trends on Wikipedia, discovering comparisons between topics and sharing them with the world. He also gave an inspiring talk on the subject at Web 2.0 Expo.

The New York Times creates some really interesting data visualizations; I especially like Casualties of war where you can investigate casualties during war in Iraq through times. The New York Times also let the mass audience participate in their Visualization lab , creating information graphs of all sorts.

Getty images got a whole stack of discovery tools to explore photos. One of the latest is moodstream that enable the possibility to sort pictures by mood.

This one is not new but I really like the visualization of Lee Byron’s histogram What have I been listening to? that shows music listening history with data aggregated from Last.fm. With inspiration from his work Andrew Godwin created a graph generator where you can generate your music from Last.fm, and compare with friends.

For more inspiration check out Visual complexity, a gallery with a variety of different visualization methods.

This approach, where designers let people use their own minds to draw their own conclusions isn’t new. But with these new conditions it becomes more essential to control the flood of information that people meet every day by putting them in the driver’s seat manipulating data in their own way, telling their own stories.

About the article’s writer: Johanna Olander works as an interaction designer and visual designer at the National Library of Sweden/LIBRIS division. She mostly works with LIBRIS the Swedish Union Catalogue, but also with other library related applications.

I live in the Bavarian capital, Munich, one of the biggest cities in Germany. Here, every year the Oktoberfest, a huge beer-drinking party, takes place. Looking for information I’ve found the consumption of beer and roast chicken since the year 1980. I’ve also found the number of visitors and put all that data together.

As one plays with the graph, it is possible to see that as the number of visitors was going down, the liters of beers has been growing, with a huge jump in the last decade. This means that the people are drinking more alcohol (I’m not judging this behavior, just showing the numbers).

I thought it was interesting to notice how a graphic could open our eyes and wanted to share it with you:

The Power of Design

This kind of websites already exist in Europe but it is usually offered by local companies, like the city-specific Transport for London website. Unfortunately, most of these were not very successful adapting for the web great design developed previously for paper. Last weekend I stopped by the Munich central station to get a paper timetable, old style but easy to understand, even if you don’t speak German language. This is the German Trains timetable for the Berlin – Munich connection:

The Copenhagen city transport website has a less lucky approach, as you can see in the picture below, reading is not that easy. (I use Copenhagen as an example but this is actually happening in several European cities like Munich, London and others).

The Google Design

The Google Maps approach is by far the best I have found. It is clear, fast and has a printer friendly version. It is also highly interactive, something that others don’t have: e.g. the Munich website displays maps only in PDF format (horrible.)

If you are not familiar with the Google public transportation service, have a look at the following video for a quick introduction. 

Some Problems

Although I love the public transit directions on Google Maps I have some worries:

1. Every time I use Google Maps a new button is placed on the map,

2. Why can I edit origin and destination from several places?

3. Some little things (like the bar at the top of the page) make me think that the whole thing could soon become cluttered. 

More Info

If you are interested on maps and timetable designs I recommend Edward Tufte’s book, "Envisioning Information" for a great inside on the topic.

Tufte’s Website

I like Analytics Benchmarking. Basically, it compares the performance of the tracked website with other similar sites. In order to compare information it requires the user to allow Google to "anonimouslly" analyze the information. Now I understand why this feature was not available at the beginning, they had to ask the people to share the data first.

I take this opportunity to write about the Google Analytics interface:

Do you like the Google Analytics interface?

In which cases organizing and browsing data alphabetically could be an interesting option?

- If the items listed are not related (e.g. no categories)
- If those item names are well-known
- It could help users to find items very fast if it’s well design
- Placing all items in one long page will allow users to search using the browser search function, saving a lot of time

Organizing data alphabetically could have some problems too:

- Looking for an entry for "For Whom the Bell Tolls"; would you look at the F or at the W section?
- It’s not going to help users if their mental model sort those items into known categories
- If the design is placing one letter per page users will have to look for items in several pages, being this a time consuming task

I wouldn’t recommend to have an alphabetical index as the only way to browse content but I would have it as an option that could help users an save them a lot of time.

Here I have five examples: