sans comic sans » Information Visualization

Brand Tags reminds me that I am not a typical internet user

Matt — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:47:08 +0000

Brand Tags asks people to describe a brand with a single word. The results are aggregated, painting a picture of how various brands are perceived.

I was struck by how unaware most people are of some of the most popular internet sites and services. Look for the giant ? symbol:

It’s a great reminder to any web designer that you are not the user, meaning the patterns, conventions, and brands we’re most familiar with online are still foreign to many people, your users included.

(Thanks to Scott for the tip.)

Wouldn’t it be nice? Milestones in Google Analytics

Matt — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:13:06 +0000

Here’s my problem: I have to remember the date I made a change on a website if I want to do a simple before and after comparison in Google Analytics.

Something happened on March 17, but you’d never know it by looking at Google Analytics.

What if Google Analytics let you place a simple marker on your timeline to help you remember events? It needn’t be any more complex than the dividend marker or news flags used to denote important events in Google Finance:

Two types of milestones in Google Finance.

A simple visual indication is all the work required of a Google Analytics milestone. I can manipulate the date ranges and data views as needed, on my own—no “milestone comparer” or “milestone manager” functionality necessary.

A small gripe about Google Analytics

Matt — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:55:57 +0000

It’s a rainy Monday morning after a long holiday weekend, so I’m crabby.

It’s a small thing, but it bugs me that the colors on the Google Analytics Traffic Sources pie chart aren’t consistent across my different websites. For example, orange refers to direct traffic here:

…but when I look at the statistics for a different website, orange can refer to something different (in this case, traffic from search engines):

Communicating data at a glance is the primary responsibility of any dashboard. The inconsistent coding of colors on this graph makes me stop my glance and think. This makes me crabby on rainy Monday mornings after a long holiday weekend.

>:(

Infographics of baseball pitches

Matt — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:21:59 +0000

These are so cool! Lokesh Dhakar created infographics of baseball’s most common pitches. I’m a baseball fanatic, and even I couldn’t have described the motion of half of these pitches. Here they are in easily digestable infographic format.

Note the subtle use of color to indicate pitch speed.

(via kottke)

The ambient, eco-aware persuasive tea cup

Matt — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:46:38 +0000

Finally, the dark ages are over! I can playfully interact with my coffee cup about serious global issues!

From information aesthetics:

when hot water is poured in, the image of sea over land appears as a direct representation of the slowly heating waters on our planet.

Kidding aside, I think this is pretty cool (pun intended).