Information Design

Styling tables presents lots of fun infodesign opportunities that are largely still untapped. Backbars is of course an example of that.

At a recent project, I stumbled on another subtle styling that I’m descriptively calling highlows from ignorance of precedents. Here it is, on the left part:

The idea is to highlight the first occurrence of a row value and to lowlight the next occurrences, until a new row value comes up and then the high switch is turned on again.

It’s a simple, useful way to help scan column values in category tables.

The different prices of 1 liter of water in Mexico, Bonafont brand (Mexico’s #1):

MXN$	USD$	Where
4.1	0.31	Wholesale (monthly volumes of ~MXN$5,000)
5.3	0.41	Sam's Club (a package of 12 for MXN$64)
8.1	0.62	Farmacias Guadalajara supermarket
10	0.77	OXXO convenience store
14	1.07	7/11 at Mexico City airport
34	2.60	soda fountain at the movies (Cinepolis)

I see them a lot in Japan, in not particularly geeky contexts, so I’m sure they must have a name. I’d call them polygon graphs. Anyone knows the common name and perhaps where I can find more about them?

Particularly important when traveling. Your new experiences will matter but your attention will matter more—what will you choose to notice?

I’d rather be a maker than an employee.
I’d rather craft products than nurse a job.
And I’d rather be a customer than a boss.

 

Icons on Arts & Letters Daily is a simple script to add website icons to the links in Arts & Letters Daily. This adds a visual layer to the all-text site that enables you to quickly scan its sources.

I’m going to Lift France 09 tomorrow! Since a big part of my motivation for going was its focus on networking, since they encourage you to fill a profile on their site and over half of the >550 participants actually do it, and since the theme this year is “A hands on future”, I decided to do a quick re-interface their list of participants, which was too unwieldy for me.

Check it out at http://elzr.com/lift

Much improved! http://elzr.com/reader It’s really getting fun now! Now you can really read the whole magazine in a single page! Plus: columns, much better design (section separators!), and… flags!

It’s still a very early release (the columning in particular will be much improved soon) so please be gentle and let me know what you think of all the changes. What do you like? What’s helpful? What would you like to see?

Note that there are some weird bugs in Safari, to be fixed later. And all bets are off on what will happen in IE, I don’t have a machine to try it in for the moment.

See the project’s history at http://elzr.com/posts/reader-economist

The page is pretty heavy, ~250k, but it still loads up in in seconds. It’s still much less than The Economist’s current front page, which overloaded as it is with flash ads, weighs a whopping 4MB!

Backbars on social link-sites is a GreaseMonkey script to turn the headlines and comments of social link-sites into ambient bar charts (of votes/diggs/views/users…) It works on Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow (and MetaFilter now!).

The idea is to give you subtle non-verbal clues to improve your browsing experience almost subconsciously. The backbars don’t replace the count they represent, what they do is convey you its magnitude unobtrusively, and, crucially, compare that magnitude to those around it. So you can now see, almost without thinking, that, say, some comment is popular, but that there’s a comment around that’s twice as popular.

Once you have it, just start browsing at your favorite social link-site: Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow.




It’s the first release but it’s very usable already, I hope.

I hope you enjoy and find it useful, please let me know what you think of it in the comments.

An experiment in improving the reading interface of the world’s best news magazine. Very early days. Check it out at elzr.com/reader.

Right now it’s just a glorified table of contents but even that I think helpful. It includes the abstract of every article or it’s first line —in my experience The Economist’s pithy, playful titles can be under-descriptive. And there are also backbars behind every title, giving you an ambient, non-verbal hint to the article’s size. Both features are there to fix something that got lost in the transition from print to web.

I’ve read The Economist for many years now, almost since the beginning from the web (I subscribed for a year when it was behind a paywall, the only time I’ve paid for content). And almost as long, I’ve been struggling with it’s interface. I guess it’s not that bad for casual readers, but for longtime junkies it can be much improved. Which is what I’ll try to do in the coming days.

Changelog:
.3 version, 16 June 2009: BIG changes. See http://elzr.com/posts/03-release-of-the-economist-reader for full details. Read the whole magazine in a single page, columns, much better design (sections separators!), and… flags!


.12 version, 14 June 2009: Fixed
.11 version, 13 June 2009: Prettier version.


.1 version, 8 June 2009: Kicking it off.