I was having a look at the state of Japanese web design today (we’re doing some customer research there at the moment) and saw this towards the bottom of the home page of the Yomiuri Shinbun site. For those who don’t know, the Yomiuri is the world’s largest newspaper by circulation. I would imagine their website is also read by Japanese from a wide variety of demographics. At first glance, the object looks like an oddly-arranged table of news sto…
Tag: infoviz
I’ve been wondering whether using Chernoff faces might be a good variation of the “advanced search” pattern in the context of finding a hotel to stay in. Choosing the right hotel requires a number of quite complicated things to be considered. But which things you place the most emphasis on depends very much on the context of why you are booking a hotel in a given location or time. If price is the only consideration you have, then you’re lucky. Th…
… mdja It’s still a significant difference in offering. Actually the figures themselves give by far the clearest (and most compelling) indication of the offer. (530 vs 510 or less). Jonathan Yes, it’s (I think) about 4% more. There are probably many other ways you might be able to impress this offer on people without implying that they’d get double the value. What, for example, can you buy with 20 Euro? Something fairly decent I would imagine….
Lovemoney.com has a free personal finance dashboard that I thought I’d have a look at. It’s really an early beta, and they’ve been soliciting feedback and generally being very receptive. So, I’ve just sent them the following email. By the way, I’ve decided that OpenOffice Presentation, with which I did the mockup, is rubbish. Apologies in advance. Hi. Sorry about this. You need to stop using a stupid piechart on the dashboard. See the attached f…
(Apologies to Mike Elgan for the headline on this one) Those in the UK who want to use Google Power Meter can do so using a wireless doobrie from AlertMe Energy. Nothing wrong with that, but words fail me at the staggeringly bad information visualisation on their site. I hardly know where to begin with this: You’d think that people involved in making us aware of energy consumption would have some clue about how to actually present the data. But l…
I remember an English teacher asking us what, in our opinion, was the most useless thing we would have to learn at school. I replied that I thought it was the capital cities of the world. What possible advantage could you have over anything with the knowledge that the capital of Peru is Lima? I was somewhat surprised that he agreed with me – although I later found it would be a trick question. He was making the point that education itself is usel…
Regular readers of Webtorque will know that I’ve droned on about tag clouds several times. Here I go again, but this time, it’s final. I promise. It comes of a brief discussion about our opinions about tag clouds at work this week, which was a good opportunity to summarise what I thought about them – and over a nice cheese sandwich, as it happened. Tag clouds are good at doing a very specific task very well, but are also hideously misused to the …
… mdja i guess they haven’t looked out of the window… it says ‘maybe’ when clearly the answer is ‘no’ Jonathan Well, in their defence it is about *future* weather, so maybe it’s about “maybe” at some (unspecified) future point? A bit like a stopped watch is always exactly right twice a day……