Showing Beer Consumption with IBM’s Many Eyes

Posted on September 8, 2008 by Alexis Brion

Infographics are a way to represent information. They should be easy and quick to understand as they usually allow the reader to compare date and see details that, before, were hidden.

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:

Caring About Users Sell: The Björk Case

Posted on July 4, 2008 by Alexis Brion

Do you deliver information to users per email? If so, try to:

Send users information that is relevant to them

Designing a newsletter that is "usable" is not an easy task but benefits could be huge: more visits and sales could be reached through good newsletter usability and marketing. Let me show you the iTunes Store "alert me" newsletter example:

The iTunes Store Newsletter

On March 13th I was criticizing Apple for sending me advertisement of an old album that I have and I listen to very often. I was wondering why they were bothering me offering an album that I already have?

The Newsletter Now: Björk

Yesterday I received a new iTunes Newsletter recommending me albums of my favorite artist: Björk. There are 2 important things here:

- iTunes knows that Björk is my favorite artist and sends me album recommendations of her,

- iTunes recommends me Björk albums that I don’t have (yet!)

Lesson

Send users information only when this is relevant to them. Recommend only products they might like to buy and they will happily click.

Improvements on WordPress 2.5, nice details!

Posted on April 28, 2008 by Alexis Brion

Wordpress is a greet blog tool that I have been using for some time. The new version 2.5 has some improvements, specially on design.

1. Default color. By default the old WordPress interface used to come with a horrible strong blue. The new one comes with a web2.0 pastel palette. This is something that our eyes can be happy about.

2. Wording. If a feature or button is not labeled properly users are going to have a hard time finding it or discovering what this feature is for. An example is the "Presentation" tab on the old wordpress administration that was hiding the design-related features of the blog. I remember having some trouble to find this features the first time I used WordPress. Now the tab is called "Design". Great!

3. Organization. A good little move to improve usability was to reorganize the menu. Write, Manage, Design and Comments are on the left, the rest was move to another corner. This puts the important stuff together and makes the administration page look simpler.