This is a visualization done by IBM to visualize the World Factbook (or so I am told by UX Mag, can’t seem to find IBM’s name on it anywhere…). I have a couple constructive criticisms about this visualization that I think can help us learn about visualizations and data manipulation. Generally, data visualizations should help you to easily navigate great amounts of data with ease, but they are difficult to make and, with so much data, can be easily confusing or unwieldy. Here’s what the of the World Factbook interface looks like when you enter:

Essentially, you click on the top panel to change what the colours represent, and you can click on a country to view more about it in the left hand bar. Perhaps the first and most interesting thing that one would want to do is change the colours of the countries so that they can get a view of all the different overarching data chunks. I would say that the first thing 90% of us would do is click on a country, as the top panel with different data points fades into the background. Certainly I barely noticed it, but it’s the portal to 8 different sets of data about the world.

Now, I clicked on a country first since that seemed like the most obvious thing. This zoomed into the country, and displayed this bar on the left hand side.

I immediately tried to play with the sliders, but they don’t slide! I’ve used data representation in this way before (lines with circles to indicate data points) and thought nothing of it (see the Personas in my portfolio). But have we come to assume that balls on lines are sliders? Without thinking, I had tried to move the little circles. How easily I see they are data points when I made them, but how easily I forget when it’s not my creation. Perhaps something to consider next time?

Now, the meat. I think it’s important that, as a user, I understand what an interface element will do. What’s going to happen when I click on a button or move a slider? Here’s where this interface really fails me.

(Click for a larger image)

There are three controls that didn’t feel connected to their outputs. To start, the control at the top controls what the colours represent, changing the meaning of the legend at the bottom. There are words at the top describing the action (“Color shows”) but they didn’t quite tie together what the colour changes meant. The second control that I didn’t quite understand was the slider at the bottom (the “Dynamic Legend”). Dragging the markers around on the bar changed the meaning of the legend colours (and the colours on the map itself). This seemed oddly coupled, and somewhat redundant. Why not just put the numbers on the slider and use the single, dynamic legend? Why have a controller for the legend that showed the same information (visually, rather than in numbers – arguably better)? Finally, there is a checkbox in the bottom right corner called “Neighbourhood View”. It changes the map view slightly, but most noticeably changes the data presented on the left hand side of the screen – oddly far away.

Anyway, neat that they were able to pull all of this information together, but I think maybe a bit of usability testing might improve this interface dramatically.