information designer

March of Dimes has created an interesting entry page to their Pregnancy & Newborn Heath solution center called whatareyouwondering.com.

An array of questions fills the page and an images of a baby is visible through the coloring of letters. You can type in a search term or select a topic from the drop down. Matching questions turn blue and pop out from the field of gray text. Clicking on on a question takes you to the answer page on their standard HTML website. Or you can just browse the large screen of questions for something you find questioning.

I like this solution as it’s a viral way to spread useful information and creates an interesting way to educate the user. The CPU usage is very high and seems to stall my browser when I switch tabs. Could possibly benefit from Bitmap caching.

As for the type of work I plan to feature on this blog, the visualizations done on Digg Labs is an exceptional example. These Flash based data visualizations use real-time data to build and reveal graphical elements that represent upcoming stories on Digg.

Currently there are five visualization available, some are more useful than others, while a couple I find are just beautiful and interesting to watch (some are available as screensavers).

Developed by Stamen Design:

We are also in continuous exploration mode with Digg’s data, generating internal research artifacts which provide new and useful views of the Digg community’s behavior (see “Research,” below). Our goal is to continually extend the possibilities of live data visualization, while addressing Digg’s real business needs.

These visualizations stand out to me for a few reasons, they are well designed and elegant to look at, they animations are smooth and continually build upon themselves, the data is interesting and of a fast pace that is quickly evolving.

I think an area of improvement would be the level of interactivity and customization. Currently you only have 3 options for which data feed you get and the interactivity it typically rollover effects or click to learn more about a story. I’d love to see some zooming or three dimensional navigations.

Digg has an API to allow third party developers to explore the use of their data. The possibilities with this are endless as there are so many opportunities to explore a better way to discover and explore current events (and viral web clips).

Circos - visualizing the genome uses a circular composition of ideograms to mitigate the fact that some data, like combinations of intra- and inter-chromosomal relationships (alignments, duplications, assembly paired-ends, etc) are very difficult to organize when the underlying ideograms (or contigs) are arranged as lines.

Friend Wheel is a Facebook Application, developed by Thomas Fletcher, which takes all of your friends, then links and groups them together to form a nice, colorful, interesting image.

Each node represents one of your Facebook friends. If two friends are linked by a line, it means that they are friends with each other.
There’s also an interactive flash version which allows the nodes to be moved and highlighted, and makes it possible to zoom in and out.
If you have a Facebook account, you can get your own Friend Wheel showing how your own friends link together.

I find this to be the most interesting way to look at my Facebook friends list. My personal friends list tends to be quite segmented, I see a large connection group of my web designer (and fantasy football) friends, then there’s the Flash community, then a group of family members (11), then high school friends, current friends, and a large group of non-connected friends.

Compare mine to Keith Peters’ (who recently blogged about this) Friend Wheel. Being who he is (Flash God and all), his friends tend to be very well connected as they are typically people in the Flash community.

The wheel is beautiful as a static graphic, but it’s taken a step further as you are able to view the interactive version, which allows you to zoom in and out and drag names from the circle to better see individual connections.

The generation screen give the user many options to customize colors, compare to other friends lists, and sorting, the graphs shown here are sorted by the default “grouping”, but I just tried alphabetically and it’s quite interesting as well.

Now I just wish I could turn it into a globe and spin it around…