Design Exercise: Visual Overviews

Using one of the sites below, or any site of your own choosing that offers visual access to  a complex information space, evaluate whether and how  it affords  Overview, Zoom, Filtering,  and Details on Demand (Ben Shneiderman’s design values).  Are  size, color, proximity, used semantically?  Does the user navigate up and down a hierarchy? across a network? Can the user rearrange the elements? Is there a choice of multiple granularities? What is an example of a specific task that the site supports particularly well or particularly badly?

Smartmoney Map of the Market

Gapminder World

http://www.wefeelfine.org/wefeelfine_pc.html

http://worrydream.com/

http://feltron.com/