fromcomplextosimple

It’s not surprising that some of the hottest trade show marketing trends revolve around social media. In the new age of social networking and technology it may seem like pop up displays for trade shows are a thing of the past. But with the use of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, businesses can be even more successful with their trade show marketing.

Trade shows are a great way to connect with prospective customers while manning your tradeshow booths, marketing partners, new employees and influentials in your industry. Learn how to use social media to get the most out of attending your next trade show by following along in the Infographic below. See how Pre-show, during the trade show, and post-show you can use social media to engage with event attendees. Brought to you by NorthWest Creative Imaging.

The skilled designers over at datavisualization.ch pulled together this list of preferred applications, code libraries, and tools. Dig in! I wish I had time to learn them all. Sigh.

The NYT presents a list of options for you to decide how to trim defense spending. As usual, it’s not quite as easy as you might think – but I still got it up over $800 billion.  I like this interactive way of educating people about budget issues.

I usually don’t like viewing stacked bars over time – it’s too hard to see what’s changing. This one still isn’t perfect, but the deficiencies are moderated somewhat by clear labels and only having the three columns. Content wise, it’s pretty fascinating too.

The old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is even truer today with the rise of social media. When we use sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest the images are what grabs our attention. Instead of telling me about your trip on Facebook, show me the pictures so that I can see for myself. When tweeting don’t tell me you meet a celebrity, post the picture. On Pinterest it is easier to make a recipe when you see the image of what it is supposed to look like. Images are important to social media sites and to any website to keep the viewers interested.

Infographic Review

Infographic Design: B+

This infographic discusses the importance of images by putting together many different images into a well-constructed infographic. The top header showing the different forms of cameras and how those have changed so much over the years demonstrates the change in how instant images are available. Instead of doing screenshots of the different social media sites the images that were used to portray these sites were very accurate. The themes matched that of their social media counterparts. I do have to say that at times it felt like there was too much going on and I was not sure where to read next. And really for an inforgraphic about images and their importance, some of the images were not very exciting. I did enjoy that one of the percentages was show as the lens of the camera that was colored in. Overall though a nice looking inforgraphic that really conveyed the message of how important images are to social media and websites.

Infographic Information: A

The information in this infographic is interesting because it really discusses the importance of a good image on your site. Pinterest has done so well because a large majority of its site is made up of high quality pictures. The infographic pointed out that Facebook has realized the importance of images and has purchased Instagram. Instagram is an app that allows users to take pictures and format them any way they would like before sharing with their friends. The discussion of how images affect articles was great because as someone who writes blogs I know that it is extremely important to have an image if you want your post to get read. The image grabs the attention of the reader and leads them to the article. I was not surprised to see the statistic that 67% of consumers said that a product image is important in selecting a product. We all know that as consumers we want to see something before we buy it so having an image available online is just expected now. The information was interesting and very informative about the importance of images on sites especially social media sites.

Infographic by MDG Advertising

Last week I was asked to speak a the Twin Cities Research Group. Below is the Prezi that accompanied my presentation. It provides insights to my data visualization process and the tools I use to create them. If you would like to learn more about the tools explored in this presentation, here is the handout that went with the presentation as well.

We’re excited to announce another new batch of sessions at the upcoming QS conference. Thanks to everyone who is stepping up to speak! The full roster of show&tell talks and breakout sessions so far is listed here.

Check out these awesome new topics:

Breakout Conversations

Is QS science?  The role of QS in scientific discovery (Daniel Gartenberg) Creating Addictive Technology (Nir Eyal) A Memex for the Quantified Self (Betsy Masiello and Jess Hemerly) How to evangelize QS to the mainstream (Phillip Thomas) Privacy Issues (Jodi Schneider) The Health Optimized Patient (Mike Gerstenfeld) Health as a Team Sport (Mei Lin Fung) Exploring the Quantified Us (David Fetherstonhaugh) Muscle testing – live experimentation! (Alex Grey)

All sessions are defined by attendees in advance of the conference, like a curated unconference. There will be overlapping breakout sessions, show&tell talks, and posters for you to choose from. We will keep posting them here as the date approaches.

If you’d like to join us, you can register here. 400 out of 600 tickets are already taken. And if you have a personal self-tracking story to share or would like to lead a breakout discussion, please let us know!

Did you know that 60% of Americans wear jeans to work? That the custom retail e-commerce market will grow by 5,000% by 2016?  The INDi Unzipped infographic from INDi Denim fills us in on the jeans we fill out!

We make custom jeans for men and women that can be fully customized in terms of style and fit. We created the infographic to show that custom is a HUGE trend in the e-commerce space and that INDi is a leader of this trend.

This is essentially a visual business plan for INDi Denim.  The infographic shows the data all about the jeans industry, the future growth of custom jeans and about INDi Denim in particular.  I would guess that the primary audience for this one is the investors and customers of INDi, but that’s a fantastic use of an infographic design!

The only thing missing from the bottom of the design, is the URL to the full-size infographic on the INDi blog.  Designers need to include the URL to the infographic so reader can find the original when the infographic gets shared, but isn’t linked back to the INDi page.

Thanks to Becca for sending in the link!

Infographic Review

Infographic Design: B

This infographic was able to bring the feel of theater into a single design.The colors used in the Wicked section were a perfect choice that fit well with the subject. The charts that were used to show the costs of the show were ones that have already been done. It would have been nice to see something a little more creative to show these costs especially when discussing such a creative topic. The top image and header was a great way to grab viewers attention and the drawn back curtain down the side was a nice addition. The chart showing the wages of those who work in the musical theater business was great because it showed an image for each of the different jobs represented. .  The stars that were used to show the wages per week on Broadway were nicely done and helped to visually show the difference in wages from a leading role to a featured part. The images of the kitchen appliances helped viewers to visualize running their appliances continuously for thousands of years. Overall a very good infographic that grabs viewer’s attention and keeps them reading.

Infographic Information: A

I am not familiar with the stats for the musical theater industry but they all seem to make sense. It is no secret that is costs millions to put on a musical production. The amount of money that was invested into Wicked and to see how much they have grossed is amazing. It was interesting to see the breakdown of the costs that go along with a musical. I was surprised to see that 17% of the investment goes toward insurance and transportation. I am not surprised to see that marketing is where most of the money goes because that is extremely important to the success of the show. The data on other musicals was helpful when comparing just how well Wicked really did. I found in interesting that Cirque du Soleil has never had a show fail where as many shows on Broadway do not make it. The wages section was informative because it showed how much each different profession in the industry make. The data on the CO2 emissions was interesting to find out.Who knew that the musical theater industry accounted for so much CO2 emissions? It was nice to hear that in 2009 most of all sets were recycled and now many shows have cut back on their CO2 emissions. All the information was interesting and informative.

Infographic by: bestshowticketslasvegas.com

What’s included in this Money, Music and Piracy graphic:

• Total U.S. Music Sales from 1999 – 2008
• Concert Tickets Sales from 2006 – 2011
• Most Downloaded Songs of All Time (iTunes)
• Music Sales Breakdown, How the Money Gets Distributed
• How Much Artists Get Paid for a Live Concert
• Countries on the U.S. Priority Watchlist for Piracy
• Cost of Piracy to the U.S. and Global Economies
• Music Piracy Compared to Movie Piracy

Infographic Review

Infographic Design: A

Certainly no small amount of time went into this infographic design. The stereo motif works well with the subject matter is music piracy and the loss of money it creates for the music companies and musicians involved. Quite clever to use the glowing decibel levels as graphing options as well as bigger knobs to show larger percentages. The digital type at the bottom was  a nice touch as well that didn’t go unnoticed. Even the inclusion of movies wasn’t awkward but the silhouette shadows of movie goers didn’t work quite as well within the design of the infographic. But still a great effort and lovely infographic.

Infographic Information: A

I certainly don’t know if the stats and figures are correct for movie and music piracy but they certainly seem on the level. Does anyone know anyone who hasn’t stolen music or a movie? I bet it would be hard to find anyone under the age of 50 who doesn’t “own” some music that fell off a truck, so to speak. The infographic does a good job showing many statistics to support their point, which is piracy steals from the artists, but also from the audience – lost revenue hurts all of us.

Infographic by: clickitticket.com

After 2 very similar posts in a very small timeframe, featuring Easel.ly and infogr.am respectively, I seem not to be able to follow the 'automatic infographics editing' scene fast enough.

Automatic resume infographics creator visualize.me has just launched Venngage [venngage.com], which aims to empower people to create beautiful infographics in minutes, so that "creating infographics [becomes] as easy as creating a Powerpoint presentation".

As a unique feature, Venngage's visual elements are displayed as pure HTML elements, which should positively influence SEO stats, page ranks and back links.

As with infogr.am, venngage is able to directly link custom data values to data-driven graphs, but offers more visualization techniques that go beyond the traditional pie chart, line graph and bar chart, and includes sophisticated techniques such as treemaps, bubble charts, word clouds, and the like. As with the other services, venngage offers the ability to combine a specific visual style with a range of configurable visualization techniques, along various editing features that range from color choices, labels and font types.

The resulting infographic can be embedded (see rough example below), downloaded as an image, or linked to.

A few days ago, we posted the website Easel.ly, a new web-based service that aims to empower lay users to design infographic-like illustrations within the browser. Unfortunately, Easel.ly seems more apt in combining infographic-like images on a canvas, than to link real numerical data to a graphical form.

So here comes Infogr.am [infogr.am], another competitor towards semi-automatic, web-based infographics editing. Developed by a start-up based in Riga (Latvia), though now based in London, the online service offers a collection of infographic themes as well as different interactive chart types (e.g. bar graph, line chart, pie chart, matrix chart, and so on). Note that next to the basic visual style, they also offer some more 'humorist' approaches (such mapping the tongue of a frog as a horizontal bar). Users, which should include journalists, bloggers, data professionals, education, financial experts and designers, can then customize their infographic by adding multiple charts underneath each other, and configure them with their own personal data.

User-generated charts can then be embedded in third-party websites (see example below) or be linked to by dedicated URLs.

So will there be a time where all infographics will look really alike?

The movie "Epic time-lapse map of Europe" fast forwards a map from the year 1000 AD until 2003 to reveal the dynamic nature of Europe's borders, alliances, unions, territories, and occupied lands.

An alternative movie takes a bit longer, but contains useful textual annotations such as the actual year that is shown and the events that occurred.

The movie was made with "Centennia Historical Atlas" by Centennia Software.

Watch the movies below.

Via @tillnm.

To understand this chart you have to be quite the congressional procedure wonk. I think they should at least have to go back to having to talk the whole time. While standing on one foot. In uncomfortable shoes. With their mom watching.

We’ve looked at female world leaders before. Here are some stats on representation (well, what is supposed to be representation).

I’ve had these conversations.

Bon Adriel Aseniero is currently a computer science undergraduate researcher at the University of Calgary under the supervision of Dr. Sheelagh Carpendale and Dr. Anthony Tang. He has an interest in Art and Aesthetic Design, while his research is mainly in Personal Informatics and Visual Analytics.

I have used some applications in my phone that keep track of my activities. Most of them do a good job in their own right; however, they always seem to come out short –no single application tracks my activities in the way I really want it to be tracked, and the feedback is almost always some graphs which are either unappealing or doesn’t give room for self-discovery. I can’t play with my data.

From the above anecdote, we can agree that users of personal informatics tools are not just members of a generalized population but also individuals. As such, they have their own goals and reasons on why they use the tools, and use a variety of reflection methods, some of which may be unique to the individual. While it is true that these goals and reflection methods may be similar enough that they can be addressed by a generalized one-size-fits-all type of personal informatics tool, but I just can’t let go of the fact that some of their needs may not be met fully. Moreover, the feedback mechanism lacks participation from the individual –what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG); there is little room for an individual to experiment on his or her data to answer questions beginning with “why” or “what if”.

So if Personal Informatics is all about Personal Data, why not make the tools for reflection personalized as well?

As a possible way of supporting the above question, I propose Deep Personalization which is the process of allowing individuals to create, or to customize to a certain extent visualizations that represent and or integrate their data. In addition to the ability to have more meaningful visualizations as a result, I argue that the process of tailoring and customizing different visualizations as an activity that in of itself provides considerable insight to individuals.

This idea stems from the time when I created three different visualizations of different aspects of my life which I found interesting, and their integration. The first visualization is Activity River, which shows a stream representing my activities throughout a day. The second visualization is D’Ripples or Directional Ripples, which shows ripples representing the directions I’ve looked at through the day and the things I see in those directions. Lastly, Place Well is a visualization of the places I went to in a day. Integrating all of these visualizations is Hours, in which I took the visual aspects I deemed important in the previous three visualizations and combined them into a new interactive visualization. The design process of each visualizations required several sketches which provided me with a wealth of insight that is generally not accounted for by pre-created visualizations. Not only did it ensure that the resulting visualization visualizes my data correctly, but it also allowed me to find personally meaningful representations of my data. Furthermore, being able to participate in the feedback mechanism allowed me to uncover correlations that I may not have seen with current WYSIWYG feedback tools. It is almost like when we learn new things e.g. cooking; it is better to actually try to perform or participate in the act of cooking rather than to just look at someone else do it.

However, even though the rewards of Deep Personalization may prove really beneficial to the individual, it faces a big challenge. Much like cooking, not everyone who tries to do it on their own actually ends up cooking something great, some fails at cooking while some excels. Creating visualizations is not a trivial task. Some questions we as a community should try to address could be “to what extent should the individual be able to customize the visualizations or any other tools for reflection?”, “What type of tool should we provide for Deep Personalization? A tool as extensively freehand as Photoshop, or a more restrictive tool that gives the individual a set of building blocks to play with?” Nevertheless, there is a philosophical benefit that can rise from Deep Personalization and it all lies in finding an effective method for providing its support in our current Personal Informatics tools.

Anyone remember what color the “tons” were on the infographic?  The Ingeniously Charting The Horrifying Power of Today’s Nuclear Bombs infographic by Maximilian Bode (posted on fastcodesign.com) puts the power of the Tsar bomb into painful perspective (but seriously my fingers hurt from scrolling). 

A simple, but great design that puts some truly huge numbers into scale for the reader to understand.

Last week we had over a 100 folks attend our 16th NY Show&Tell with a Demo Hour held on Tuesday, May 8th at an incredible space that was generously provided by Digitas, a digital brand agency that has watched and supported QS closely over the years.

Thank you to my co-organizers, Ben Ahrens and Brian Gallegos, who helped pull together this recap for the blog.

DIGITAS LABS DEMO HOUR

Digitas Labs and Ben Ahrens assembled a fascinating group of QS members to share their stories, innovations and experiences in our first demo hour that had a real science fair feel. Some of the demos ran on some awesome touch screen devices provided by Digitas Labs. It started at 6pm with the following demonstrations:

Zack Freedman demos Optigon

Sandy Santra gave a lively demonstration of a truly unique DIY self-tracking system built for the iPad that not only charts psychological changes and their effects, but also provides users with full editorial control over data fields and allows them to customize their own personal experiments.

Kat Houghton, founder of ilumivu, displayed a wearable emotional state detector designed to empower people with the ability to tap into their own behavior and the behavioral responses of children with autism to help facilitate positive health and lifestyle changes.

Folks gathered in the Innovation Room as Alex Smith demonstrated his software called “Timebinder” which he designed to create visual timelines out of timestamped data — particularly useful for bringing asynchronous time series data from multiple sources into a single view for analysis.

Craig Dunuloff took spectators through a virtual blast into the past with his app Rewind.me. Where was that restaurant? How may friends were there? What did the gang do last night? This app allows users to get more value out of what they’ve done in their lives by aggregating data from other services such as Facebook, Foursquare, Tripit, Runkeeper, and more. It also lets you see and compare your activities to those of your friends and the world at large.

Amelia Rocchi gave QS members a behind the scenes look at InsideTracker – a web-based service that helps individuals optimize their overall health and performance by giving them a unique view into their personal biochemistry.

Christian Monterroza unveiled his time-tracking project that uses geo-fencing to passively track and organize daily activity. One of the most fascinating and helpful aspects of Christian’s app is that it allows the user to easily and personally allocate different regions of spaces for different activities, i.e., the park is for running; the freeway for driving; the living room for sitting; the grocery store for food shopping, etc. The app then takes over and auto-logs the activities based on its users geography. Fully customizable – NO LOGGING REQUIRED!

Zack Freedman (@ZackFreedman) was quick to draw a crowd with “Optigon” – a wearable wireless cyborg system that integrates with the user’s smartphone allowing him or her to access all data and keep it in plain site – even view nearby mobile user’s text messages, or as Zack puts it, “read people’s minds”! This awesome demo was every bit as impressive as it looked. Zack is currently seeking partners and investment to turn his devious device into the Arduino of wearables.

SHOW&TELL TALKS

Following the demo hour, we had four inspiring talks from QS members of the NY community.

How analytics improved my personal life and helped a losing soccer team

Stefan Heeke has a background in analytics and wanted to start using this skill for three self-improvement projects.

The first project was measuring his physical health. He was using the Fitbit to track his activity. He discovered that it takes some time at the beginning but then eventually he discovered what works for him. Specifically, he identified three areas: don’t eat fried food, cut out snacks, and cut out alcohol.

The next project was a daily journal. He decided to write down numbers to better understand how he feels each day. He found that he could gather some very actionable data by correlating the right metrics with each other. His approach is to identify both a positive and negative correlation to the activity. For example, he would correlate stress, whether he had a successful day, or general feelings of satisfaction. He also tracked his commuting time. He wanted to figure out how his daily commute impacts his mood. He found that as his personal time available decreased, his food quality decreased and his television time increased. Overall, he found that a) social days are good days, b) proximity to work is important, c) stuff in general has no impact, and d) TV is a time killer.

The third thing he tracked is how to apply personal metrics to a soccer team. He tried to model the most probable outcomes for certain soccer scenarios in terms of likelihood of success. As a result of the tracking, the team made it to the finals of the soccer league.

Ultimately, Stefan learned that whenever you apply data, it has a transformative impact and if you want to improve your life, data can help. He was also surprised at the number of distractions he ran into and how much that had an impact on his life.

Quantifying Diabetes

Jana Beck started her self-tracking journey with the goal of better understanding the impact of her diabetes. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 19 and has been dependent on synthetic insulin for survival since. Her problem is that dosing insulin is not easy and is not a one-size-fits-all thing. It requires a lot of adjustment and impacts people differently. She set out to better understand her diabetes and better optimize her glucose management.

She started using a continuous glucose monitor on the back of her arm last year. This device transmits blood readings every 5 minutes and she gets trend and rate of change information. She has a target goal of keeping her readings between 70 and 130 mg/DL.

Her first experience was shock and her next was frustration. She found it hard to change her patterns. So she developed a hypothesis and set out to test it. Her hypothesis is that she needs to restructure her carbohydrate intake. The first step was to read a book on the topic (Good Calories / Bad Calories by Gary Taubes). The next was to use her monitoring device to track how her glucose changed based on her changes in carbohydrate intake. Her conclusion is that a low carbohydrate diet had a significant impact on her readings.

To run her analytics, Jana built her own statistical analysis program using R that tracks daily percentages over time for each type of blood sugar reading (carb-restricted vs. regular diet) against a target. Her program is called iPancreas and is available on Github.

Her next step is to try and start pulling in other variables (exercise, mood, etc.) to see how this changes her patterns. Ultimately, Jana’s self tracking project taught her how to best eat so that she can control her diabetes.

Walk all of Manhattan

Alastair Tse recently moved to NYC six months ago to work at Google. He hadn’t spent much time in NYC previous to moving here and wanted to better discover his new home city. Each day he commutes from 27th St. to 14th St. in Manhattan. One day he was trying to figure out the optimal route to work and wondered how many patterns are there to get from point A (home) to point B (work). He further extrapolated on this idea to see if it’s possible to walk all of Manhattan, and track it.

He started by writing down his walking experience in a notebook and just using general Google Maps. This turned out to be a bad idea because it wasn’t scalable and Google Maps can be buggy. So he built his own mapping app that uses Google Maps but allows him to map his own routes. The app tracks the streets he goes down and allows him to edit each route. It then tracks the routes he takes and shows his walking history.

He learned that it was possible to track something like where in a city a person walks and it’s very useful. In fact, he found that he hadn’t walked one square block north and one square block south of his apartment, much to his surprise. It got him to wonder, what other areas of the city is he often near, but never explored. The app helped Alastair adjust to living in a brand new city and has given him some ideas for places he wants to eventually explore.

How visualizing health problems could help solve medical mysteries

Katie McCurdy is an interaction designer with Myasthenia gravis, an auto-immune disease that causes muscle weakness in voluntary muscles She’s had it for 20 years and has been taking a drug to help the disease. She decided to take an alternate route and consult a holistic doctor. This was a new doctor so she was very motivated to make sure this new doctor understood her entire 20 year history with the disease. So she decided to make a timeline, from memory. She drew a timeline that included when she was feeling good and when she was feeling bad. She annotated the timeline for when she took certain drugs.

Initially, this was all drawn by hand. But as she worked on it, she decided to digitize it. So she next built the timeline into Adobe Illustrator so the graphs can be more accurately represented.

But it wasn’t enough to see all of her mood timelines separately. She wanted to overlay them so when symptoms go up and down, she can see how they are associated with each other.

Two variables she tracked were gut feelings (physical) and voice strength. These are two areas in which the muscle constriction has a high and very noticeable impact. This experience has helped her tell her story in a structured and coherent way and for that reason, this entire project has been helpful.

She learned that antibiotics were probably making her sicker, that docs are busy and probably skeptical of yet another patient created graph, that better health visualizations can be a great storytelling tool, and that memories are data too. Ultimately, she ended up being inspired and is currently doing more focused tracking in other areas of her life.

See our interview with Katie in an earlier QS post here.

Thanks to everyone who came out. We’ll get the videos up soon. See you this summer at the next NY QS Show&Tell.

After taking a few months off from blogging I’ve decided to reinstate the visual voice blog as a place to share tips and resources for using data visualization to clarify complex information and tell your story. If you have any topics you would be interested in talking about, please pass them along. Thanks! Elissa