One area we’ve been paying particular attention to recently has been the internet traffic for different web site categories. Our friends over at comScore Inc. collect a wealth of information for “measurement of the myriad ways in which the Internet is used and the wide variety of activities that are occurring online.” Nice alliteration, guys.

Using some of the data they’ve allowed us to share with you, we had the bright idea to stuff it into our most favoritest charting type, the treemap. And what’s better than a chart? Answer: an interactive chart with a toggle button.

You’ll need to know a few things to really Juice the data:

• The map is based on unique visitors by site for August 2007 and November 2007.
• Red means a decrease in unique visitors over that three month time period and green means an increase. Black means there is no change.
• You can click on the category headers to zoom into each category. Click on the category header again to zoom back out.
• We provide two views of the data: the default shows just the top ten sites in each category. However, for nearly all categories, sites outside the top 10 account for over 50% of the visitation in the category (the exceptions were Search, Portals, and Auctions where the top players dominate traffic). A checkbox adds “All Others” and gives you a better sense of the size of each category. You can toggle these two views using the checkbox just below the map.
• Due to some confidentiality restrictions that we’re under regarding the raw data, we couldn’t show other metrics that would really make this visualization sing—but I bet if you contacted comScore, they’d be glad to discuss with you.
• A few tech notes. The treemap is adapted from Josh Tynjala’s capable open-source Flex Treemap component. Site images are provided by Amazon.com’s Alexa site thumbnail service.

So, without further ado, take a gander at our latest liberated data:

http://internetmap.juiceanalytics.com/

There’s so much information here, you won’t have any trouble drawing your own conclusions, but here are a few conversation starters:

• Notice that there was a distinct increase in retail web visitors leading up to the holiday seasons.
• Surprise! eBay owns auctions
• Not too good of a showing for those online gambling sites; travel either.
• Sports traffic is up… but not for the MLB.com site. Oh yeah, baseball season is over.

Enjoy.

Disclosure: comScore is a client of Juice Inc.

Edward Tufte has produced a illuminating video tour of the user interface of the iPhone. The video illustrates Tufte’s struggles to come to grips with the difference between dynamic screen resolution and the resolution of printed paper. Tufte is prone to grandiose pronouncements, like this one:

All history of improvements in human communication is written in terms of improvements in resolution: to produce, for viewers of evidence, more bits per unit time, and more bits per unit area. Slideware is contrary to that history. Trading in reductions in resolution for user convenience or for pitching may be useful in mass market products or in commercial art, but not for technical communications. The solution is not to rescue slideware design; the solution is to use a different, better, and content-driven presentation method. On this solution, see our thread PowerPoint Does Rocket Science—and Better Techniques for Technical Reports — Tufte Nov 10 2006

Somehow, I don’t think the importance of the Gutenberg Bible related to it showing “more bits per unit area.” Quick, count the “bits per unit area.”

It didn’t take bits per unit area to revolutionize communication in the past and it won’t in the future either. The iPhone is a tremendously engaging information device and points the way forward for information displays. Here’s what the iPhone does well:

Maximize screen real estate: Controls are only visible when needed, fading away gently when you are concentrating on content. Tufte furiously neologizes, calling this “computer information debris.” Control junk is more apt, more terse, more Tuftian.

Direct manipulation: As Tufte says: information is the interface. Filtering and choosing should take place in the context of direct manipulation. A good essay on the possibilities of direct manipulation can be found here.

Fun: Above all, information can be fun and engaging to navigate. Tufte condemns Apple’s stock ticker for having “cartoony” and PowerPoint-like displays and offers an improved version (with 5 digits of precision). Apple’s cheery display offers a more entertaining, usable interface for day-to-day usage.

With our empathy for the day-to-day troubles of the business person seeking insight in data, it’s frustrating listening to Tufte. He is clearly an academic, with academic interests and academic timeframes. As much as his work is respected and inspirational within business circles, he makes little effort to enable his message to be implemented.

Good Tufte: Clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design. If the information is in chaos, don’t start throwing out information, instead fix the design.

Bad Tufte: “…the conclusion of sparkline analysis in Beautiful Evidence, where the idea is to make our data graphics at least operate at the resolution of good typography (say 2400 dpi).” http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msgid=0002NC&topicid=1 *Ed: At least 2400 dpi? Orly?

Mostly right Tufte: “Thus the iPhone got it mostly right.”

Mostly wrong Tufte: “Adobe Illustrator is a big serious program that can do almost anything on the visual field (other than Photoshop an image). Most of my sparkline work was done in Illustrator. Fortunately all graphic designers and graphic design students have the program and know how to use it, so find a colleague who knows about graphic design.” http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msgid=0000Jr&topicid=1&topic=Ask%20E%2eT%2e

It is heartening to see Tufte engage and connect his mental frameworks to our modern, screen-oriented, graphics-accelerated, not graphics-designed world. But the future of information design and interaction belongs to the iPhone, not the printed page.

The design process is about whittling away distractions, making the obscure feel obvious, making the obvious feel implicit, and doing it without anyone noticing. To the untrained eye, your best work looks like you’ve done no work at all. If you’ve done a stellar job, then your design will feel utterly obvious. —Neil Mix from Paradox of Elegance blog post.

Neil goes on to say that "it’s easier to see the flaws than it is to see the elegance." That may be true, but a careful look at the best interfaces reveals the little and beautiful elements that make all the difference. These small features might not determine whether someone uses a piece of software, but they will determine if the user enjoys their stay:

Designer Bret Victor, who we first wrote about here, has developed a desktop widget for the SF-area train schedules. He allows users to change their query right in the description of an object—notice the red text.

While we are fawning over Bret's handiwork, here's another cool feature he built into his Click-Shirt site for customized design of t-shirts. This bar at the bottom of the screen tracks the history of changes as the user designs a shirt. Each time I make an edit, I get a visual breadcrumb trail to easily see my history and backtrack.

Google Finance stock charts have a nifty little device that lets you change the time range you are looking at. You can change both the size and the start of the time window using one adjustable object. Not to mention the embedded alert markers.

Some elegant touches are more subtle. Check out the search toolbar in Firefox. When I start typing, it fills out search terms both from my history (above the line) and from common searches (below the line).

The Safari browser for Windows offers a new approach for finding words in a web page. The browser greys the screen and highlights the target word. And you can to tab through the various instances of the word with the orange highlighting.

And while we are on the subject of Apple: sometimes the difference between clunky and good is simply about the quality of the images. A while back I wrote a break-up letter to PowerPoint—one reason was that the Mac-alternative called Keynote does a much job with the look of default charts. The chart on the right feels more professional, in part due to the anti-aliasing of the image. (Joel on Software has an interesting post about anti-aliased fonts here.)

Finally an infographic from the New York Times called the Sector Snapshot. The beauty of this presentation of information is in the careful use of contrast and skill at keeping the focus on the numbers.

Google Analytics has been rebuilt and the result redefines the frontiers of doing analytics on the web. Avinash Kaushik has the definitive early review.

I had the privilege of attending the launch and playing with the early release. Here are a few things I noticed.

• Speak my language: Google has put a lot of effort into replacing specialized terms with everyday ones. This makes the application usable by a broad base of people and is one way to fight GUI Jock-itis.
• Speed kills: The interface is easily reconfigurable and fast. I've long argued that interface speed is a substitute for configuration options. I'm curious to play with the tool and get a better sense if this is true.
• Flex rules: Much of the componentry for viewing data in Google Analytics is built in Adobe Flex. This is similar to Google Finance, and not at all like GMail or Google Reader, which use the GWT. We believe this has profound implications for analytical tools on the web and will dig into this in later posts.

Everyone wants a dashboard and the promise of a world in which the intricacies of your business are clearly laid out on a single page. Dashboards can make running your business as easy as driving a car, where slight adjustments and careful attention to warnings mean smooth sailing on the road to success.

I'm not so convinced. For someone who is, check out the mysterious Dashboard Spy. He/she has a massive collection of dashboard screenshots and describes these precious morsels as "simple to understand and impressive to look at, these scorecards are becoming 'must-haves' for all enterprises."

If we already live in a dashboard-centric world, we might as well do them right. I see at least three areas where dashboards need improvement: depth, information display, and storytelling.

Depth. Stephen Few makes a worthwhile distinction between dashboards and something he calls "faceted analytical displays" (FADs):

• A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.
• A faceted analytical display is a set of interactive charts (primarily graphs and tables) that simultaneously reside on a single screen, each of which presents a somewhat different view of a common dataset, and is used to analyze that information.

We might consider dashboards a static version of FADs (or we could consider FADs a versatile dashboard). If that's true (and I'm sure Stephen will step in to correct me), then who wants a plain dashboard? Why build something that only raises questions but doesn't give the user any ability to drill down, explore, tweak parameters, or otherwise try to answer those questions?

Information display. Like most reporting, dashboards suffer from poor information design. Here's our list of blogs that preach the right way and highlight the offenders. Here are two particularly misguided design approaches that I've seen recently...

Just because it is called a dashboard doesn't mean you need to take the concept literally (via Dashboard Spy)

Just because you can make it shiny doesn't mean you should. Crystal Xcelsius not only vigorously embraces pie charts, but they add a "reflective kidney bean" to further derail the information display.

Storytelling. Most dashboards are loose affiliations of charts—a hodgepodge of graphics on the same topic intended to offer a full view of a situation. It is the same problem so many people run into in creating PowerPoint presentations.

You want the information to easily slide into the viewer's brain and stick when it gets there. The best dashboards have story-like features such as:

• Set the stage. What is the context? Who are the characters?
• Focus on only the important elements and themes; don't try to be a comprehensive account of everything that happened. Ruthlessly cut extraneous content.
• Offer recognizable characters to spare the reader's precious attention. There is a high cost to asking readers to learn from scratch. For dashboards this means terms, metrics, graphics, and metaphors that are familiar within the organization.
• Create flow and cohesiveness from chapter to chapter. Themes and characters reappear chapter after chapter. A good dashboard isn't a bunch of disjointed charts, but a logical flow from one analytical examination to the next.
• Levels of detail. Some elements of the story span the entire experience; other details provide the insights and seasoning to keep your interest.

Here's a good example of a dashboard (perhaps FAD) from Visual I-O that has many of these storytelling elements.

In contrast, the following dashboards (courtesy of Dashboard Spy) don't attempt to explain anything to the reader:

If you've seen a worse dashboard, sent it our way and we'll put together a gallery of the worst of the worst. Please redact any company-specific information.