Baron and I have been working together for quite awhile now.
I am pleased to say our first true collaboration is public!
I directed, he designed (fabulously) a new homepage for City forward. I then lead the dev team and consulted with Russ on the design as challenges came up.
The original page had a lot of issues, more like a wall than a doorway in many ways. It was unclear what to do and where to get started. The whole idea of this new page is to get the user onto a second page and get them rolling. It's all about encouraging the user to click forward.
we still have quite a bit of data issues and difficulties in our chart controls, but we're working through those.
Canvas, SVG, jquery, ajax...
Check it out...
Thank you Baron.
Very cool.
One usability nit. Chicago, for instance, is partially obscured by Milwaukee, and so clicking only takes you to Mil (until you zoom in to separate them - it seems the number, not the circle, is the hot spot). Is there a way to have them divide the area when they overlap that much?
Good stuff - I'll dive more through it later.
yeah the prime problem with that is making a circular area clickable in javascript. Not as good as flash.com
I totally understand the concern. it was a compromise. We have a plan to clump circles as you zoom out which would provide a little drop down select of the cities included in the clump.
Ah - that would solve it.
I saw B's link to that on the book of faces. Cool project!
Again, I thought this thread was about Bacon.
Damn you Baron.
:homer: Bacon Rocks
That's pretty interesting Walt. The code name for the code for naivigation at the bottom of the home page is "Homer"
The release code name was Orange, cause of the orange circles, nothing exciting. But we also use fred, barney, george, astro and other cartoon characters when we talk about different sets of code on the project.
I must confess, I do have a soft spot for Baron. He's a lovely chap.
The site doesn't work on my iPad, so I'll check it out at work tomorrow.
Yeah we know we have ios issues. But by the time you get to the data, you're going to need more horsepower anyhow. It's a desktop/laptop experience for now.
When we say we're providing the data, we mean it. The charts are loading raw data from COGNOS server cubes and charting it in real time with Elixir and JS. It isn't a EPS file full of questionable statistics about fast food. 
Originally posted by persist
When we say we're providing the data, we mean it. The charts are loading raw data from COGNOS server cubes and charting it in real time with Elixir and JS. It isn't a EPS file full of questionable statistics about fast food.
Not just an "info-graphic" then. 
I think we should have a competition.......which is tastier: baron or bacon?
it's struggling a bit on my laptop, but I do have a lot of windows and tabs open so that's probably not helping.
Does the Map Visualisation not work?
I chose pie chart but it drew concentric circles.
And when I choose the plot chart to compare two values, e.g. crime count and unemployment rate in St Louis, it gives me one nicely plotted set and one set that is stuck at 0 due to the scale used.
It is an awesome project though, did you build the charting code from scratch or is there a plug in there?
yeah still struggling with data normalization. and we know our pie charts arre difficult. We're looking at some new charting products to add to the site. You have to remember that the system isn't going to create a good visualization automatically. It's a tool for making/tailoring your own. So, like photoshop or whatnot, it takes some time to really get comfortable and know what work flows work for you.
We're working on computed fields as well as presenting data as percentage changed over time to help with the default chart issues.
I am excited to hear you're in there playing, success or not though. before people would hit the homepage and runaway scared.
Originally posted by Storm
I think we should have a competition.......which is tastier: baron or bacon?
No competition - Baron.
Why can't we have both?
Baron wrapped in Bacon?
what about bacon wrapped in baron?
Originally posted by persist
what about bacon wrapped in baron?
Yee-ha!!
Originally posted by persist
I am excited to hear you're in there playing, success or not though. before people would hit the homepage and runaway scared.
the thing that put me off the most wasn't the data, it was the requirement to sign up and log in before I could do anything But since it's you I went ahead with it.
When you create a new exploration, it would be nice to be able to pick more than one to plot up front, unless I missed something you can only pick one (the one you hit Create Exploration against) and once that's done you can then edit the list of data items to plot.
I think the Refine Data inteface would be easier to use if it didn't refresh the map and itself with every change you make - could it not do it after a single "Update Map" button click? Or is it that the list of choices in Refine DAta is affected with every choice you make?
YES!
In march we're allowing anonymous access to the data!
and YES! agreed on all user experience comments. We're working on it. I inherited that drawer from another director. We're excited to change things.
I will put your suggestions in our contact box, so the stakeholders see your ideas. It's important they see these things coming from a user's perspective. I really appreciate the time you've taken to look at it.
Aww! What a cool thing to see upon a return from an extended 12s sabbatical. Thanks for the love, everyone.
Persisto has done an amazing job of defining and directing the project. It comes with some serious challenges - collecting and normalizing datasets from hundreds of cities around the world (not to mention the legal wrangling required to do so), building the tools to manage said datasets, implementing the systems to get all this available for use by the public... I can't imagine the volume of brainpower that's gone into building the backend. The homepage design constitutes maybe .005% of the real scope of the work.
The Potatochop analogy is spot-on. I've been thinking of the UX like an F1 steering wheel: it may take a larger up-front investment of attention than we've become accustomed to on the web, but once you get it you can go 200+mph.
The trick for us now is to reduce the size of that initial investment while still maintaining that 200+mph potential.
what's the target audience btw?
I was aware while doing it that I don't really have any great interest in comparing crime rates to GDP in St Louis, and that if I did I might be approaching things very differently.
Well spoke Monsieur Ruhstoff.
Target audience is urban systems analysts, city planners, etc.
We've found though that consumer level visitors really want to explore this data. So we're building workflows for these users.
You need to be going for this one instead. Ha ha :
