UIEtips article: Playful Data – 3 Inspiring Interactive Web Sites
February 11th, 2008
I just got off the phone (well, Skype, but it’s the same thing, sort of) with Steve Mulder. We were recording an interview, talking about his experiences with developing rich interactive applications at Molecular.
What really struck me about his experience was how much we can now do within a browser. Once folks figured out ways to eliminate page refreshes, a world opened up to allow for truly immersive experiences.
In this week’s article for our email newsletter, UIEtips, I explore some of these experiences and what they can bring to a business environment. A few weeks ago, I looked at what the New York Times did for delivering news in an interactive format. In this article, we’ll explore what other companies can do for their customers.
Are you using highly interactive designs to create an immersive experience for your users? If so, what challenges have you run into?
Steve Mulder, Jeremy Keith, Andrew DeVigal, and Steve Duenes will be presenting their experiences with developing highly interactive experiences as part of our UIE Web App Summit. I highly suggest you check out the program and consider joining us. (I just got back from visiting Coronado, where the event will take place. What an amazing resort! It’s going to be great fun.)
February 11th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Jared,
Your coverage about Gapminder is extremely topical – exciting times are definitely ahead. Since Google acquired Trendalyzer (the technology behind Gapminder) in March 2007, there has been a period of silence about what Google plans to do with it.
In the last few weeks, however, a number of official Google gadgets for iGoogle became available. These include a Trendalyzer gadget (see http://www.google.com/ig/directory?q=trendalyzer&url=www.google.com/ig/modules/trendalyzer.xml) with which anyone should be able to plug his/her own data with this powerful visualization tool.
At the moment, documentation is still missing, so it is a challenge to figure out how this gadget actually works.
Timo
February 11th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Hello Jared,
Definetly it is challenging job to present the data more useful. I’ve noticed that Kayak (www.kayak.com) has similar interface as Frecast. When I compared Kayak’s presentation with Farecast, Kayak interface is much easier than Farecast. Kayak has concentrated on users primary task which is finding the price for their search and secondary actions like compare prices presented in text links. Where as Farecast presented the results page with compare prices with attractive graphics which distracts users from results list view. Kayak’s “Chart” tab and Farecast’s “Prediction” tab both helps users to make decision.
Rajesh Kalidindi
February 11th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
We talk a lot about bringing different skill sets together to make a wonderful user experience — be interesting to put a statistician, ixd and developer together to look at how to present years of data.
I would like to see someone do this for a specific sport where you could look at variables like — teams who played against each other, weather conditions, player heights, weights etc etc and see what it comes out with in terms of trends of team’s success/failure.
February 12th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I was hoping to find more than just words… links to those inspiring interactions at the very least.
February 12th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Oops! My fault.
The three sites we talk about are Mint.com, Farecast.com, and Gapminder.org.