This piece in BusinessWeek does a great job at bringing to light the huge discrepancy between how the concept of “mobile” is so vastly different here in the US than it is in developing markets like India. This has come up a lot recently at work and I think it provides really valuable perspective when thinking about designing mobile applications.
For us in the US, our mobile devices often serve as satellites to our PC experience and we often evaluate our mobile experiences in terms of how they compare to that PC experience. In India, there are 30 million PCs and 300 million phones and for many people the mobile phone is the only way people are going to experience being online. Ever. This means that you can’t rely on the PC experience to provide any additional context to a corresponding mobile experience, which makes for an even more challenging mobile design process.
Weather Underground has been my go-to source for weather on the web for the past 5 years ever since my buddy Gabe introduced me to it. At first the site felt way too information heavy for me but after giving it a chance I’ve grown to love all that data, partly due to the care they put into displaying it.
A great example of their clever approach to what could be a relatively boring and simply executed site (ahem… weather.com) is this little feature on their custom iPhone interface. Above the forecast for the next few days it gives you a quick sentence about the upcoming day’s weather. Rather than just give you a number, they put the day’s weather in context with the previous day’s weather, giving the forecast more meaning to the user.
Another example of how they’re trying to be more than your usual weather site is the ability to customize the style of icons you see throughout the site, again creating a personal connection between the user and the data.
Does this make them a better weather site? No. Does it differentiate them in a field of sites that are essentially delivering commodity data? Absolutely.
The first… potentially. The second… heck yeah! Check out Mike Arrington’s “review” of 23 and Me‘s consumer level (if said consumer has $1000 bucks to burn) DNA test.
You get some fun stuff:
Some of the information is just for fun – I have “wet earwax,” for example, and don’t have the “alcohol flush” gene that turns people’s faces red when they drink. I don’t detect odors as well as some people. Less usefully, 23andMe notifies me that I have brown eyes. I have a gene which makes people tall (I’m 6′4). I do not have a sweet tooth.
…and some not as fun stuff:
I Then there is the more serious stuff. It turns out I have a gene that makes me substantially more likely to have lower back pain (something that has plagued my father all his life, but not me so far):
have a higher than normal chance of getting Type 1 diabetes, but a lower than normal of getting Type 2. I have a lower than average chance of getting prostate cancer and Rheumatoid Arthritis. I do not have the genetic material that gives some people resistance to AIDS, although I do have a gene that makes it progress more slowly. I am not genetically resistant to Malaria. I have slightly increased memory performance.
You even get it all in a slickly-designed interface.
I think this stuff is absolutely fascinating.
Check out Mike Arrington’s Review + Results here.
I wanted to highlight Apple’s subtle way of enhancing their data presentation. The iGoogle themes that change according to the time of day is another great example of this. What can you do to make your design feel more “alive”?
Also, if you know of other examples, please drop them in the comments. Thanks!
Check out this IA 2008 Webtrends clickable map. I *love* this stuff. (Thanks for the tip, Kevin!)
Maybe the Twitter/Superbowl visualization has got me fired up but now I want to take the most recent Obama vs. Clinton Gallup Poll data and overlay the major campaign events on top of it. According to this it seems like Hil enjoyed her best day right around Super Tuesday and its been downhill since. Maybe a Clinton “Tears Shed Overlay” would be fun too?
Gallup Daily: Tracking Election 2008
