Archive for January 2008

Dennison asked excellent questions in response to How to Do Usability Testing Cheap and Fast:

Tell me if I follow correctly: Do you do the test only on users that have their own PC with them? So if you happen to be in a store where nobody has a machine or is willing to take the test, then, tough luck?

Why worry about having the users test in their own environment (PC)? The focus of the test is on usability. Testing to see if the site works properly across different systems should be part of QA work and can be done separately.

Bill Moore from RadioTime responded:

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In reading articles and books — over time, I’ve learned to try to avoid beginning a sentence with “There” and using “is” or “are.” Doing this enriches your writing and encourages you to find more interesting verbs.

Write and Drop or Substitute
When I catch myself writing, “There are…” or “There is…” I complete the sentence. For example, “There are many books about computers.” Then, I rewrite it to drop “There are” and start the sentence with “Many” or substitute “There” with something else.

“Many books about computers …”

“The library carries many books about computers…”

Manuscript Analyzer can help dump those trouble words and phrases. It looks for frequently-used words and “identify junk phrases, ‘frequent offender’ word patterns, and adverbs.”

“Got” Has Got to Go
Use other verbs in place of “got” or “get” as another way to strengthen your sentence.

Instead of …

“He got a new car.”

Use …

“He bought a new car” or “He received a new car” (lucky guy!)

“Got” Gotcha
Need to add a gotcha based on work I’m doing for a client’s Web content. I’ve used “get” a few times because I don’t want to use “receive” too many times.

Other words such as “obtain, be given, accept, collect” don’t do the job. They feel awkward, they don’t flow naturally, or they don’t work.

“So you can receive what you need… ” doesn’t work as “So you can accept or collect what you need.”

In other words — you don’t have to kill “get” — but avoid it where possible or use it less.

Chefs, start your engines! Go Go Gourmet takes you on a culinary trip. Begin as a junior cook and sauté your way up to master chef. Once I get the hang of game, I instantly gain a hearty appetite for the game. Folks, this does not resemble any food game you’ve played. Sure, it has a little Cooking Mama in it, but Go Go Gourmet goes goes beyond the goals of cooking up goodies and fast.

Grandpa Henry hands over his restaurant to Ginger to do with as she pleases. The catch: Grandpa’s restaurant needs a lot of work. Well, hey, it doesn’t cost us anything to get a restaurant. So Ginger (us players) goes to work for Chuck Bergerman (har har, nice pun, designers) to earn money to revamp Grandpa’s restaurant as well as learn her way around the kitchen.

Here, we don’t just run around the kitchen and fulfill customer orders. A level starts with a customer’s face popping up along with a cartoon bubble that lists all the steps and ingredients in the requested dish. A step typically consists of the ingredients to find and ends with cooking the collected ingredients or delivering the dish to the customer.

In every level, the ingredients move around the kitchen. As we work in new restaurants, the kitchen set up also changes. The stove might be on the right in one restaurant and on the left in another. So don’t get too comfy. Impossible to get bored!

You get a feel for where some ingredients will appear, so it’s not as difficult as it sounds. As you cook more recipes, you earn new recipes and ingredients. The kitchen looks barren early in the game and overflows with ingredients later on.

Before you tackle the second or third step with your first customer, customer #2 pops in. Now we must manage two orders at the same time. Be ready to manage up to four customer orders. Sounds frantic, but it’s so much fun.

Don’t expect fake recipes here. The recipes for the dishes look authentic and come to life with a photo as you deliver them to customers. As we gain experience, we move to another restaurant serving different type of food. Ginger learns Pan-Asian, vegetarian, Parisian, seafood, English cooking.

A mini-game comes in every handful of levels. One mini-game calls for catching flying items, another requires you to find ingredients as fast as you can… in the dark. These fit the game nicely and involve memorizing anything like many mini-games tend to do.

As you successfully deliver customer orders, you receive tips. Those tips go toward remodeling Grandpa’s restaurant. On occasion, Ginger hears from, but he doesn’t hear so well during the phone calls. The story moves along smoothly between levels as Ginger converses with her bosses.

However, the game has a typo or two. Tiny nitpick considering the superb quality of the game. Before finishing the game, I had already decided I want another game… and there just might be.

By the end, I feel like a pro especially when I wildly managed multiple complicated customer orders. I memorized some recipes I ran for the first ingredient as soon as I saw the customer’s order and before checking the list of ingredients.

Boy, I wish this feeling would carry over into real life. Cooking in Go Go Gourmet almost makes me want to return to cooking real meals for the family. That’s almost — something about actually chopping and shopping for fresh ingredients doesn’t have the appeal of doing it virtually.

The ingredients of good music, high addiction factor, sharp graphics, and original concept make an award-winning recipe in Go Go Gourmet. Please, sir developer, may I have some more?

Bulleted lists on Web pages help readers scan and find what they want. Two situations that do well with bulleted lists are series and instructions. Also, beware of indenting, spacing, formatting, and whitespace.

Series
For situations where three or more items appear separated by commas, they might work better as a list. Instead of, “Bring an apple, orange, and banana” use…

Bring:

• apple
• orange
• banana

This doesn’t need numbers as order has no impact. The space between “Bring” and the list might be too much as people might not instantly associate the two with the distance, but CSS can fix this.

Instructions
When steps call for doing tasks in a specific order, numbered bullets work well. eHow.com does this nicely. Take care in situations where you have a choice. For example…

1. Peel apple.
2. Cut apple using one of the following ways:
   • Dice the apples using the chopper.
   • Cut the apple in half. Cut both halves in half for four wedges. If you want smaller wedges, cut the four wedges in half.
3. Serve.

With instructions, you can also clarify a choice like this:

• Dice the apples using the chopper.

• or

• Cut the apple in half. Cut both halves in half again for four wedges.

In this version, it’s clear you have a choice since “or” separates the choices.

Indenting
Notice Step 2 takes up more than one line and uses the indent? Some sites don’t indent lines beyond the first and it’s hard on scanning like this:

1. Dice the apples using the chopper.

2. Cut the apple in half. Cut both halves in half for four wedges. If you want smaller wedges, cut the four wedges in half.

Spacing and Long Lists

It’s also possible to break up a long series such as what to pack for sleep away camp. That list can easily get long. Break up the series by categories (i.e. clothes, toiletries, linens). Also, instead of one long list — put the list into columns to avoid wasting white space.

But what about a long list like 175+ Data and Information Visualization Examples and Resources? Do the numbers throw you? Numbers typically represent order, but this list uses the alphabet. The numbers determine the number of resources.

Furthmore, the list divides into three categories. Can’t do more than one column simply because the content space is narrow. Plus, some of them have comments.

• Stupid Sh*t People Put on Their Resumes: Funny stuff [Link: Freelance Folder]
• Paper Toys: Print, cut, fold, glue, and play! And a paper airplane flight lasts over a minute in New York. Just… WOW. [Link: Good Experience]
• 75 words every sci-fan should know
• It’s Complex to Write Simple These Days – But Hemmingway’s Rules of Writing Can Still Work: Short sentences, short paragraphs, energetic English, and be positive not negative.
• Technology for Country Folk: Comic.
• 10 Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2007 [Link: Expert Access]
• Grading World Flags: Chile earned an A-. Does that mean Texas also gets an A-? The two flags are only different by a small square. [Link: Kottke]

Thanks to the 007 of Dashboards (Dashboard Spy) for creating the 175 The Ultimate List logo. You’re welcome to steal the logo.

175+ Data and Information Visualization Examples and Resources post is the inspiration for the logo.

Bill Moore of RadioTime shared his experience of gathering feedback from users in a sandwich shop. It’s amazing how easy it is to get user feedback with zero overhead, that’s cheap, and leads to actionable results.

I asked him why didn’t he go to the (in)famous coffee shop since their wi-fi usually works well (wi-fi in the sandwich place was flaky). He said the coffee shop is louder. At the sandwich shop, people stay longer and the tables are bigger.

RadioTime.com offers a free complete guide to radio and sells a product that lets you record radio just like TiVO records TV. When doing on location testing, consider the following:

1. Pay attention to time and setting: People are less likely to be in a hurry at lunchtime than in the morning before work, for example.
2. Make testing clear before starting: Be upfront about time commitment, what you’re doing and why, what the user will do, and any other relevant information. RadioTime lets the user know that there’s nothing to download.
3. Keep notes: Be ready by having a form and a clipboard. Perhaps, consider recording the user’s feedback with a non-intrusive recorder. Use a clipboard in case you can’t access the table when making notes.
4. Talk with the store manager: This assures the store that you’re not doing anything suspicious and plus you’re building a relationship.
5. Wear logo or display company badge: Helps with trust and credibility.

Here’s what Bill said about doing testing in the sandwich shop.

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The hidden object-based Dream Day series begins with marriage and follows with the honeymoon. Jenny and Robert take the next big step in a marriage: Buying their first home. In Dream Day First Home, they need our help renovating, redecorating, and dealing with crises.

The creators behind the series continue to add new features to keep the monotony away. At the start, we get to select one of two homes that need a little fixin’ and lovin’. One is a home from the 1930s craftsman and the other is Victorian style. If you’re indecisive like — no worries, you can play both. Pick one and you’ll do the other later.

Like most hidden object games, you search for specific items in the rooms of Jenny and Robert’s new home or at specialty stores like the cookware, hardware, and garden stores to get supplies.

Whether you’re in a hurry or not depends on if you’re playing timed or relaxed mode. Timed mode — although more challenging — offers a few twists. For one, every few levels you receive a special item that adds one minute to the clock. You must remember the item because it won’t appear in the list of hidden objects. When found, the clock gains one minute.

The best twist of all comes in the superclues. These hidden objects take two steps to solve. For example, you need to find a screwdriver. Since screwdriver appears in a blue font (different from the rest), it indicates it’s a superclue item. The scene has a toolbox, so click the toolbox to open it and reveal a screwdriver. Click that and the game crosses off screwdriver from the list.

As with its predecessors, this one lets you receive more hints — this time it’s golden eggs. Each egg adds more liquid into a test tube, and when it fills — the number of available hints goes up by one. Use a hint whenever you need help and the bird shows you the way.

Also new in Dream Day First Home is The Attic Mini Games. This contains three puzzles that you can play up to four times each.

• Perfect Match: This mini game hasn’t changed from earlier Dream Day games. It requires making pairs of matches (like Concentration).
• Puzzle Garden: Pair up two items that go together like match with a matchbox and rain with umbrella.
• Fix-R-Upper: Not really a game, but resembles a slot machine. You spin for new furniture and the slot gives you design options. You can lock and unlock three slots and spin three times. If you don’t like the result, you can play again.

Again, the piano supports the game’s classy style with classical music. Classical music may not fit many people’s tastes, but it works lovely with the Dream Day series. The series also has great storylines where we contribute by picking one of three events. Dream Day First Home tells the story of Jenny and Robert moving into their home, redecorating and interacting with their community.

Dream Day games don’t last long by hidden object standards. However, Dream Day First Home lasts longer because of the two homes. Complete both homes to reveal a surprise at the end.

My “Robert” loves hidden object games and this one caught his eye. He started playing where I left off! Talk about testing a marriage He and I have the same complaint about the game — repeated use of rooms and objects in the same place. While it’s acceptable to re-use rooms and objects, this Dream Day First Home does it too early in the game and too often.

One other issue — the game would not run on a computer running Vista. It freezes near the beginning. The system requirements say the game can run on Vista, so try before you buy.

The Dream Day franchise continues to stay strong with the new features of superclues and Fix-R-Upper mini game that lets you design new furniture. We don’t feel like the developer took short cuts to release another game by slapping a new story on an old formula. Three words describe Dream Day First Home: Warm, sweet, and fun.

System Requirements:

• OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• CPU: 1.0 GHz
• RAM: 128 MB
• DirectX: 9.0
• Hard Drive: 134 MB

Since taking a class that discussed Edward Tufte‘s work, I’ve been fascinated by turning information into visual data. His site contains many examples that you could easily spend hours on the site. I have. Plus, I spent several days browsing sites with articles, resources, and examples of infovis (information visualization) in action.

It’s not just about presenting data in a presentation or making things colorful. Infovis also helps us find and understand things quicker With the growing implementation of electronic dashboards, we need to learn how to create effective visual representations of data to make the most of dashboard technology. Here’s an infographic about useless infographics

It’s a struggle for me as I haven’t practiced this process or created any charts in a long time. Here are examples and resources for inspiration and learning.

Updated: 9 July 2010

ShortURL to this post: http://bit.ly/yz7to

Examples

1. 5 Amazing Infographics for the Health Conscious
2. 10 Outstanding Social Media Graphics
3. 10 Revealing Infographics about the Web
4. 10×10 is “100 words and pictures that define time.”
5. 15 Things You Didn’t Know About the Brain
6. 35 Great Social Media Infographics
7. 3D Animation of Linux Code Development
8. 7 Nights of Bright Eyes article and accompanying visual analysis of Conor Oberst.
9. 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization
10. AInews.org: Note the .org! Use the other and you’ll get an R-rated surprise. Simple news headlines appears in different sizes. Mouse over a headline for a summary or click the + to save it (up to 10).
11. AntarcticAnimation: “Reveals the profound human connections that some have made with Antarctica’s changing landscape.” Animations and map.
12. Archival Maps from Library of Congress
13. Atlas of Cyberspaces “is atlas of maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the new electronic territories of the Internet, the World-Wide Web and other emerging Cyberspaces.”
14. BabyNameVoyager byMartin Wattenberg.
15. Baseball Teams: Salary vs. Performance [Link: Lauren's Blog]
16. Ben Fry’s archive of past work at MIT that blended computer science, graphical design, and data visualization. Zipdecode shows how zip code numbering works and Salary vs. Performance looks at baseball teams and spending. Learn how to do these with Fry’s book, Processing: A Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists.
17. Books That Make You Dumb: Of course, reading them won’t lower your IQ — little humor, y’know? This chart comes from data based on books read in college and comparing that to SAT scores. The higher a book scores, the smarter it is.
18. Business Planet interactive map that shows how hard or easy it is to do business in many economies.
19. Candidate Match Game: Very cool tool from USA Today that’s not a game, but more a tool to help you see which candidates share your opinions on big issues. It’s the chart that appears after you complete the questions that amazes.
20. Cartifact interactive maps and animations. Explore the company’s site for more examples (commercial).
21. Charteo.us: Uses charts to track book sales rankings. More charts coming.
22. Chris Harrison’s Projects Page: Man, this is incredible. It includes Visualizing the Bible, which visualizes cross-references in the Bible and others I’ve already mentioned in here before finding this.
23. CityVisions: Maps of cities
24. Civilization Maps video
25. Corporate Connection
26. Dashboard By Example has examples of actual business dashboards that started as part of the Dashboard Spy. Also, Dashboard Spy’s Big List of Experts, Dashboard.TV (videos), and Dashboard By Example. Busy spy!
27. Data360: Maps and charts of issues ranging from local and international to arts and business.
28. Data Visualization of a Social Network is the result of a school project.
29. A Day in the Life of The Colour Economy
30. Death and Taxes 2008: See where your federal tax dollars are heading.
31. Digg Labs using visualization for managing the latest news.
32. Dream Ether: Create a dream or see other dreams and other experiments.
33. Duarte Design work examples (commercial). Nancy Duarte is the author of slide:ology.
34. The Dumpster is a visualization of romantic breakups.
35. Ear Studio timeline.
36. Etsy takes a creative approach in helping people find products with tools such as the Time Machine and Geolocator.
37. Felton Annual Report 2005, 2006, and 2007
38. Flickrvision
39. FlowingData and its archives have many visualization examples.
40. Formwerks, architectual firm using infovis on its site. Not sure this is effective as it may be difficult for prospects to figure out.
41. Geopictorial Maps (commercial)
42. GMap: Drawing graphics as maps includes maps of trade relations and book maps.
43. Goldstar Beer Flow Chart Ads: One, two, three – sexist or not, admit it’s creative.
44. Good Magazine’s Transparency is a “graphical exploration of the data that surrounds us.”
45. Google Chrome overview by Scott McCloud.
46. Google Maps: Now you can see buildings up close in Street View. Wow. That took a heck of a lot of time to do.
47. Google Trends: Charts based on entered search words.
48. Grokker: Dynamic search.
49. HCIL Visualization houses past and present visualizations projects.
50. Historic Cities contains maps relating to past, present and future of historic cities.
51. Brief History of Visual Aids
    HistoryShots information graphics prints for sale, but it’s an experience to look at each one and read about them (commercial).
52. Human Flows visually and interactively maps global migrations.
53. Idea Line by Martin Wattenberg
54. Idea Mapping Success: Book idea maps
55. If You Printed Twitter…
56. InfoGraphics: Four Ways of Looking at Twitter: Use of TwitterVenn and other apps.
57. Internet Memes provides an interactive timeline along with a description of each meme.
58. Imagini: Find your visual DNA.
59. John Grimwade‘s index of diagrams and maps.
60. Jon’s Excel and Charting Pages contains many examples of using Excel for charts.
61. Jorge Camoes’ Charts
62. Juice Analytics’ writings includes many visualization examples. Check out the apps and tools especially the Chart Chooser. They recreated the NY Times Cancer chart.
63. knowledge-communication.org gallery contains visuals for faciliating knowledge communications between experts and decision makers.
64. LinuxDistribution Timeline
65. LivesConnected through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
66. Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Infographics: Don’t let the title throw you. Lots of great stuff.
67. Many Eyes from IBM contains many visualizations.
68. MapEcos: Map of US facilities with information on pollution and improvement efforts.
69. Mark Lombardi works: An abstract artist who researched scandals.
70. Martin Wattenberg research projects list includes History Wired is a visual exploration of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s holdings that seeks to reproduce the serendipity experienced when browsing in a physical museum, History Flow, QuerySketch, and Map of the Market.
71. Materials Research Center Interactive Directory
72. MedMaps: MindMaps for doctors and medical students.
73. MindMap Library: Collection of 1000s of mindmaps.
74. MindMapPedia: Collection of mindmaps that welcomes submissions.
75. mindServe Group: Example diagrams and templates (commercial)
76. MyMap e-mail relational map.
77. MySociety Travel Time Maps and other projects. Comments on travel time maps from co-creator Tom Carden.
78. Newsmap
79. Nigel Holmes Explanation Graphics charts, diagrams , and motion graphics.
80. Panorama-Maps
81. Perceptual Edge has examples of turning data into visual information and before and after examples to show how to better tell the story behind the data. Participants in its forums discuss good and bad examples.
82. Places and Spaces: Mapping science.
83. Prefuse Gallery
84. Processing examples including Inequality of CEO salaries.
85. R Graph Gallery shows graphs created with programming environment R.
86. RoomforMilk: “Fresh skimmed Slashdot headlines.”
87. Sesame Street on visual thinking. An old video teaching visualizing shapes.
88. Small Business Blogging Map: Get the big picture on how blogging helps small businesses gain more customers.
89. Social Networks around the World: Which social network does your country use the most?
90. Starbucks and McDonalds Infographic: See how the two franchises are taking over the world… close to it.
91. Stef Crowley portfolio and cool video of her creating a historical timeline for the University of Buffalo (commercial).
92. The Story of Stuff (commercial)
93. Swivel: Explore, share and upload data. Check out the Swivel Bar for Excel.
94. Tell Me a Story provides tips on telling stories through presentations.
95. They Rule lets you “create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004.”
96. TopicScape Mindmaps Directory
97. TouchGraph Google Browser explores connections between related Web sites. Also available: TouchGraph Amazon and TouchGraph Facebook.
98. Tracking the threat looks at data relating to terrorism.
99. Twittervision, TwitterMap, TwitterSearch
100. Understanding USA by Richard Saul Wurman
101. US Demographics Visualizer: Filter and use color codes to review US census data by population, age, ethnicity, political, and income.
102. Usenet Newsgroups hierarchies treemap
103. The Virus Lab: Get your own Social Virus
104. VisualComplexity looks at visualization of complex networks. It also has a wealth of related links.
105. Visual Dictionary Online
106. Visual Insight murals that illustrate information.
107. Visual Literacy, an e-learning course, has maps and demos.
108. Visual Think Map’s Photostream: Flickr page of visual maps.
109. Visuwords online graphical dictionary and thesaurus
110. Washington DC Metro Maps helped me get around Washington, DC for six years. The hardest part was figuring out the end of the route so I could ensure I got on the right train.
111. We Feel Fine: An exploration of human emotions in six movements.
112. Wikipedia visualizations: Clusterball, WikiViz, First Monday, A Beautiful WWW, and Wikipedia Top 50.
113. WikipediaVision shows anonymous edits in realtime.
114. Wikipedia Diagrams, Drawings, and Maps page and this shows the definition of Pi.
115. Winner of the personal visualization project as well as other entries.
116. WorldMapper has over 366 maps for exploring.
117. WorldProcessor uses globes to show distribution of different world parameters.
118. You Are Not Alone Here and other projects by Steven Baughman and Michael Tabtabai

Blogs

1. Beyond Bullet Points Blog covers ways to use media to communicate. Author Cliff Atkinson’s Sociable Media has more resouces.
2. BldgBlog focuses on architecture, but talks a lot about great visuals and illustrations.
3. The Center for Graphic Facilitation
4. CommonCraft: Folks behind the great presentations that explain stuff like RSS and Wikis.
5. Cool Infographics has a collection of many amazing posters.
6. Creating Passionate Users uses many nice visual images in its entries as support.
7. David Sibbet discusses visualization and graphic facilitation.
8. Dataisnature
9. Data Mining: Text mining, visualization, and social media has a neat map of the blogosphere.
10. Digital Roam blog by The Back of the Napkin author David Roam — about solving problems with pictures — check out the presentation on the book’s site. Two maps from the book.
11. EagerEyes
12. emo+beer = busted career … seriously, it has visualizations.
13. Forest and the Trees: Flash and data visualization
14. Found in Translation
15. Future Feeder: Discusses impact of information and computation on architecture.
16. Idea Mapping by the author of Idea Mapping, Jamie Nast
17. Indexed : “This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.”
18. InfoDesign
19. Information Design Watch
20. Information Is Beautiful: Indeed.
21. Infographics News
22. Information Aesthetics: Data visualization and visual communication.
23. Information Visualization
24. JunkCharts: Blog dedicated to recycling bad charts into junk art.
25. Karl Gude
26. The Mind Mapping Software Weblog
27. Mindserve Clipper
28. Neoformix
29. Networked Performance on Visualization
30. NiXLOG Infographics
31. Nooface: Searching for the post-PC interface
32. Point by Fascinating Point
33. ProcessingBlogs and ProcessingHacks: Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound.
34. Random Etc.
35. Serial Consign on Infographics
36. Strange Maps
37. Street Anatomy is a blog on medical visualization.
38. Tableau Software on data visualization.
39. The Underlying Blog
40. Peace of Mind
41. Visual Business Intelligence by Stephen Few
42. Visual Linguists is a blog by Neil Cohn on visual language of comics.
43. Visual Methods
44. VisualSpeak Blog
45. Visual Thinking School
46. VizThink Blog
47. Writing on the Walls by Visual Thinking: Tools for Mapping Your Ideas co-author Christine Valenza

If a blog isn’t listed — it may be too new, hasn’t been updated in a long time, doesn’t have enough entries. Of course, I may have simply missed it. Please add it in comments or email me.

Resources

1. 37 People You Should Follow for Infographics on Twitter
2. 70+ Excel Tips and Shortcuts to Help You Make Excel Magic is a list similar to this one with a focus on Excel.
3. 70+ PowerPoint Presentation Resources would benefit from these resources and you can see how some people used infovis in their presentations.
4. Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards: How to include data visualization as an important part of a web site not as a lone figure or chart.
5. Alltop Infographics page: You know how Alltop operates. Blogs covering the topic all in one page.
6. The Art of Visual Thinking: Guy Kawasaki shares a drawing of his own based on Alltop.
7. Beyond Bullet Points teaches how to tell a story with PowerPoint without resorting to useless templates. Think of it as presentation turned into visuals.
8. Bob Horn is an expert on visual argumentation mapping and his site posts speeches, articles, and examples including the cool home page.
9. Communicating Concepts through Comics: Presentation
10. Data Visualization: Modern Approaches from Smashing Magazine has tons of examples, articles, tools, and resources.
11. Dataesthetics: Power and Beauty of Data Visualization by Eric Blue who has more entries on infovis, visualization, and mindmap.
12. Dave Gray Info
13. Drawing Together Online: Presentation
14. Edward Tufte site has forums, examples, articles, and more.
15. ExcelUser has articles on plotting with Excel such as Comparing Metrics by Category and tips for dashboarding with Excel.
16. Gapminder is a non-profit organization that uses data visualization to get its message across. Hans Rosling, co-founder of the organization, turns boring numbers into animation to help us make sense of the world especially in Gapminder World.
17. generator.x : Examines role of software and generative strategies in art and design. Associated blog.
18. GTD for Mindmanager: Getthing Things Done on Mindmanager, software for
19. History of Cartography tutorials
20. How to Create MindMaps with Mindomo
21. InfoVis Wiki
22. Inf@Vis! InfoVis.net Digital Magazine
23. InstantAtlas: Software for visually analyzing statistical data. Examples.
24. Introduction to Sketchcasting, a way to combine podcasting with sketching. Arclabs has other experiments and resources of interest.
25. An Introduction to Visual Thinking: Presentation
26. Jerry Isdale’s Big List of Infovis Links. Just like it sounds.
27. John Grimwade Information Graphics has cool diagrams and maps.
28. Logic+Emotion: Visual Thinking Archive: Presentation
29. Mapping History with art and images
30. Mapstraction: “Library that provides a common API for various javascript mapping APIs to enable switching from one to another as smoothly as possible.
31. Map Your Mind: Mindmapping resource.
32. Mentegrafica is a blog by Daniele Galiffa on information visualization. His site also has infovis projects and presentations posted.
33. OLIVE: Online library of visualization environments.
34. Online Schools: Education made fun with info graphics.
35. Periodic Table of Visualization Methods: Very cool interactive table.
36. Pictorial Maps from Wikipedia
37. ProcessTrends covers Data Analysis and Visualization with Excel Tools and Charts.
38. Proximity Graphs is a tool that connects actors based on movies and authors by papers in computer science journals.
39. RadicalCartography: Does map visualizations and also includes resources. Click the menu items to see samples.
40. Rico Clusters: An Alternative to Mind Mapping
41. Sketchcasting = podcasting + doodling
42. SPSS Viz Designer: Software that provides visual clarity to predictive analytics analysis.
43. Squidoo page on Visual Maps
44. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design): Provides visualization as an option for viewing the information.
45. TextArc: Visual representation of text.
46. Toxi: Interactive works include base26 (all four-letter words in English)
47. Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies
48. Twine’s Visualization topic
49. UNO (UNiversal Organizer): Mind mapping tool. No software. Just plain paper.
50. Visual and Creative Thinking: What We Learned from Peter Pan and Willy Wonka: Presentation
51. The Visual Dictionary serves as an academic resource where images replace words.
52. Visual Editors “is the online classroom and meeting hall where student and working journalists from newsrooms around the world come to study the latest reporting, editing and design techniques, story forms, media trends, and interactive strategies.”
53. Visual Literacy: eLearning tutorial on visualization that also has a periodic table of visualization methods in its maps section.
54. Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design [pdf file]: Booklet with a basic introduction to information design for non-governmental and advocacy organizations.
55. Visual Thinking Squidoo page by Xplane’s Dave Gray. And his Visual Thinking Art.
56. VizThink: Conference focused on visual thinking.
57. Walk2We: Visualizes connections between web sites.
58. We Make Money Not Art on visualizing
59. What Ordinary People Need Most from Information Visualization Today [pdf file] by Stephen Few.
60. York University Gallery of Data Visualization shows contains many resources, data visualization timeline, and examples.

My dad influenced me to become a regular blood donor. He donated as regularly as he could until health issues deemed him ineligible. Some of you may already donate regularly, but don’t designate your donation to anyone because — thankfully — you don’t know anyone in need of donations … until now.

If you had to stop giving blood because of a health issue — you may be able to give again if you meet the criteria.

An 8-year-old, Madalyn White, is a patient at Children’s Hospital. Throughout her treatment she is receiving transfusions of between six and eight pints of blood each day, and will likely need well over 500.

Please consider donating blood in Madalyn’s name.
Blood products including whole blood, plasma, and platelets) donated in her name will be credited to her “account,” helping the family significantly in many ways. Helping her only takes an hour of your time or less depending on what type of donation you do.

The Story

From Tiki Cocktail:

“She has been diagnosed with a combination of two blood disorders that have been nicknamed ‘Madalyn’s syndrome’ because the physicians had never seen this combination in any patients before. The official diagnosis is hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) and thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP).

“To make matters more complicated, Madalyn is not showing ‘typical’ symptoms and is not responding to treatments in a traditionally ‘typical’ manner. The reason for my email is to make a request. On an almost daily basis, Madalyn has been receiving red blood cell transfusions, fresh frozen plasma transfusions and is currently undergoing plasmapheresis at Children’s. While her parents husband have health insurance, blood products are not covered (the process of the transfusion is covered).”

How to Help
Call your local Carter Bloodcare to schedule an appointment. The appointment phone number is 1-800-366-2834. You can make an appointment online or visit www.carterbloodcare.org for more information.

Where
Find a donor center at Carter’s Web Site (http://www.carterbloodcare.org/location.aspx) and enter your zip code.

Who Can Donate
Be at least age 17, 110 lbs, healthy… see donor guidelines for more details

Crediting Madalyn’s Account
Please print this donor designation form and bring it with you to your appointment. It contains all needed information for Madalyn to get credit for your donation.