Interactive Information Design and Social Media
I have a bit of a fetish for awesome information design and it gets nearly compulsive when it becomes a reacting entity on the world wide web. The idea that massive amounts of information, many times being ever-changing and dynamic can be molded into a visual form, manipulated, and sifted through is all sorts of awesome to me. I will admit, I am the type of person who flips through a Magazine (backwards) to look at all the pictures first before deciding what I want to read in it. Maybe its my ADD that makes bare-bones text not interesting enough to hold my attention, or perhaps its just my love of pretty pictures, but I foresee a future where information on the web is presented in more interesting interactive methods more often. With the user interacting and producing data through social media, creative interactive visualizations of the data produced brings a whole new fresh engagement to the experience.
Obviously this concept is not that revolutionary, there are many places on the web that showcase stellar interactive information design. Technology such as flash and Java have made it possible to illustrate and animate static concepts. Popular examples of these are interactive timelines, maps, and experiences.
Examples:
Explore Monticello
Battle of Gettysburg
Now lets take this concept a step further. Rather than illustrating stagnant information lets visualize dynamic content. Instead of actual events or places the user can now see broader concepts such as emotions or relationships. A major attraction to social media is discovery, the process of finding that 6 degrees of separation between them and someone they met at a conference or party. Interactive information design illustrating that connection introduces the user to tangible representation of what that relationship is.
Check out some examples!
We feel fine was built by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar as an experiment. The system…
searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). …
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion.
Digg Arc
Arc was developed as a collaboration between Digg and Stamen Design (who are Bad-ASS) to display stories, topics, and containers wrapped around a sphere. Arcs trail users as they digg stories across topics. Stories with more diggs make thicker arcs.
Twitter Blocks
According to this site Twitter blocks was designed
to allow users to navigate Twitter neighborhoods (or “blocks”) in an abstract way. A public timeline is represented by an orange sequence of blocks, which offsprings a set of block series that depict the statuses of users & the people they follow. The visualization is designed to allow existing twitter users to discover other existing twitter users.
While many of these applications serve as entertaining ways to wade through tons of information there is rarely a deeper motivation or end goal than to just find more interesting information. I am hoping to see this type of interactive information design utilized to not only enhance the enjoyment of surfing through social media but elevate the effectiveness of the experience.
A great example of a site that is using visualization to enhance their search function is
etsy.com
Not only does this method help shoppers but it helps buyers to connect with others in the network who are interested in their products. Etsy is a marketplace for “all things handmade” where you can find a seller who creates products with a specific style, and then see their connections to locate other products. These visual functions help the user manage a concept that is vague to verbalize and subjective… “style”. You can also search through a geo-locator and sort by color. These search methods contribute to the experience of shopping, making Etsy as much a social network as a marketplace. In some circumstances I even feel addicted to using these visualizers, like a video game… gradually becoming more effective at navigating through the merchandise to be rewarded with the perfect product.
Social media can be visually interesting and innovative. If designed with the user’s end-goal in mind creative ways of surfacing content can enhance the overall experience of the web.
[tags]interactive information design, twitter blocks, digg labs, digg arc, etsy, wefeelfine.org, interactive social media, user experience , Web 2.0 Design, Web 2.0, visual thesaurus, Stamen Design[/tags]
September 20th, 2007 at 6:59 am
Another great write-up; thanks.
I took an English class in college which was titled “Cybertexts and Cybermedia” and proclaimed to be “an exploration of the changing face of textuality in an online era”. Now that I look back at the class in 2001, it was so far ahead of its time!
The professor called it “information space” and that is what it really seems to be more and more. He had us “look at a variety of new technologies while gaining an appreciation of the rich and diverse forms of textuality made manifest in existing and emerging electronic environments.”
It is awesome when a forward-thinking English professor can so fundamentally reshape the way I look at and approach design (even if mostly information design). The web has really opened the doors for the possibilities of how we share data and even tell a story. No longer does it have to be page by page or left to right. As you state, the challenge really rest with the designer, how can we physically created these experiences that will be both meaningful and engaging. The right user experience is truly the key!
September 22nd, 2007 at 10:44 am
What a great blog for ideas and inspiration! So glad I found you through digg. Keep up the great work. You are in my bookmarks.
September 27th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Great post, I really enjoyed it. I also agree with you, a great interactive visual design creates a great experience for the user. I like it when data is manipulated and displayed all pretty like. :)
September 28th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Dude, you should check out my Etsy page and be my Etsy friend! :)