Data visualization
I've been facinated by data visualization ever since stumbling upon the field. Here's a collection of products and experiments I've worked on. If you have a cool side project idea let me know!
NVISION
I was asked to design and create a visualization framework for Nspyre's big data unit to provide customers with customized and branded visualization dashboards. As I was planning to run an experiment on such a framework as part of my masters thesis I took the challenge. I created a web-based app called Nvision based on Angular and D3 that allows customers to create and customize their own visualization-dashboard.
Through iterative user-testing the product was refined to create a better experience. After that I used it to answer my masters thesis hypotheses. I tried to find out whether exposing users to the plumbing of an application (the green arrow in the image) would help them create a representative mental model and work more efficiently. You can play with the original study setup using this this link.
184 participants took part in the study and the result was interesting as I found the opposite of what I expected. Participants in the condition without exposed plumbing (or information flows as I've called them) performed worse instead of better. My theory is that exposing people to more stimuli in the user interface will increase cognitive load and distract them, making them perform worse on a task, especially when this is already complex. More evidence to keep products simple and clean.
iBrowse
This Chrome Plugin simplifies and enhances the experience of searching Chrome’s browsing history. Browsing behavior is visualized as a calendar heat-map, showing on which days what websites are visited. When entering a search term the corresponding days are highlighted, so you can quickly find that website you visited the other day.
The application also shows you interesting statistics about how, when and how often you browse the web. Try finding your own patterns and enjoy exploring your history.
Created in collaboration with Wouter Jansen and Ivo van Bon. You can find it in the Chrome Webstore and here's a link to the Repository on Github.
Energy clock
Created in collaboration with Wouter Jansen and Ivo van Bon, this project was started as part of a cooperation between the energy company Fortum, and the KTH Stockholm. The goal was creating awareness of energy consumption among the general population through an ambient display in the living room. You can play with the prototype here. Here's a link to the Repository on Github
The energy clock visualizes energy consumption data of an average household to create this awareness. By touching the bars, the user can change between different visual styles. The different types of energy can be toggled by touching their respective icons.
Finally when touching the time, the user can explore the energy consumption history. This visualization is best displayed on an iPad and was created for this type of device.
