infovis

Acoustic Information from Basketball Courts

May 14, 2009

I came across an article on ANSI standards that had an interesting human factors anecdote. Thought I would share: It seems that a critical part any basketball game is the wood flooring, something which the fans generally take for granted, but not so the players. Basketball floors are highly engineered surfaces, made of three-quarter inch thick tongue-and-groove northern hard maple, [...]

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Map Information Visualizations = HOT!

May 1, 2009
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I‘ve noticed a trend in the newsworld/blogworld recently. Everyone wants to represent everything on a map. Some of these are genius, others make me wonder “why bother?” I collected some of each for this post… but I warn you, once you notice this pattern you’ll start seeing it multiple times per day. Job loss from Slate.com: (Usability note: good luck [...]

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Dashboards meet the 21st century

April 10, 2009
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Reader Darin Ellis sends along this news item from MSNBC about the future of car dashboards (hint: analog is out, glass screens are in).  There is a great quote in the article from the visualization designer of Chrysler: A lot of usability studies need to be done. Designing these is not a no-brainer. In addition to this article, here are [...]

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In 2019 I will be 44…

March 1, 2009

Here is a neat vision of what 2019 will be like courtesy Microsoft Office Labs.  This concept video was produced by Microsoft and shown at the Wharton Business Technology Conference.  Two things that caught my attention were the prodigious use of touch interface and gestures (which I am not crazy about; my finger/hands get tired using my iPod touch to [...]

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Google PowerMeter

February 10, 2009

We’ve spoken before about the role of human factors in energy conservation. It looks like Google is taking a big step toward raising awareness of home energy usage from your desktop.  With the installation of home energy meters, you may soon be able to track your own power usage: Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart [...]

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Interface aid for hyper-milers

November 26, 2008
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I have at least one friend who admits to “hyper miling,” or watching the MPG gauge at all times and trying to keep his average as high as possible. In one way I find this to be a fascinating task that one could use to study multiple-cue learning, pattern recognition, or adoption of superstitious behavior. (After all, was it kicking [...]

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Where are visitors coming from?

November 25, 2008

This post isn’t human factors-related but I just wanted to share with you an image showing where the last 100 or so visitors came from (click for a larger image). For our United States readers, have a Happy Thanksgiving!

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Another tool to keep up with election news

October 8, 2008

TechCrunch posted a link to another tool to keep up with the flood of election-related news coming from news services and each of the presidential campaigns.  Dipity Election Center presents news items in a time-line format. The interface is very cluttered and not exactly intuitive (e.g., unclear what all the little icons below the timeline mean), but an interesting way [...]

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The VP Debates: An Adventure in Clutter

October 3, 2008

Perhaps it is because I associate CNN with Atlanta, a city dear to my heart, that I care so much about how badly they choose their on-screen visualizations. Last night I watched before, during and after the debate, which meant I was as informed as could be about their graphics (and even saw the gratuitous use of this Minority Report [...]

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Infovis in the Debates

September 26, 2008

I‘m currently watching the first presidential debates, presumably with some fair percentage of America. There is a graph at the bottom of the screen called “Audience Reaction.” I cannot figure out the data. As you can see, the two parties and independents are represented by colors on to the left. The Y-axis seems to increase (I think the center is [...]

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Visualizing election news

September 11, 2008

Here is an interesting website that aggregates news items about both US presidential candidates and visualizes that data providing a nice dashboard-like “snapshot”.  Once you click on a bar or candidate name, it shows you word-sized historical graphs (sparklines) of their popularity.  For more information on sparklines or other ways of visualizing data, see Edward Tufte.

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Infographics in Movies

September 1, 2008

Have you ever seen those cool interfaces or graphics that are shown in movies, mostly sci-fi, and wondered who created them?  I ran across this old post on Flowing data about a guy who creates those “infographics”.  Sounds like a very cool job!  I think I first became aware of infographics/visualization in the 1997 movie Event Horizon (which is when [...]

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