We’re very happy to be able to show-off our collaboration with the Illinois Department of Public Health and IPRO. This map makes information about the quality of health in communities available to the public, highlighting socioeconomic disparities that may exist. When combined with our indiemapper platform as well as linked graphs and charts, the clinical data in the map can be used to examine the health needs of a community, county or region for better policy and planning.

Above is a quick demonstration video showing the basic functionality. After watching the video, check-out the map itself.

HOORAY! The San Francisco typographic map is finally finished and is ready for purchase today. I made a big push to get this map ready for the holidays (with some help from Andy and Ben) and we’re really happy with the way this turned out. More images.

I went a bit overboard and decided to map the *entire* city; The amount of fine detail in this map is pretty astonishing. To fit the entire city onto a poster, of course, means the type itself has to be much smaller to fit it all in. In fact, the street text is half the size of the Chicago map (6 pt surface streets versus 12 pt) so there’s lots of detail for your eyes to enjoy.

GO BIG: Given the crazy density of streets I strongly recommend you get one in poster size (23×34 or up) so you can best see all of the parks, water features, and twisty streets the city is famous for.

WHAT’S THIS ABOUT LETTERPRESS?! Great news, we’ll be offering limited edition, gorgeous letterpress prints on rich cotton paper in the first half of 2011. While we love Zazzle (their prints rock), many of you asked (and begged!) for us to do these as hand-made, limited edition art prints and we thought that was a great idea. Want to be the first to know when they go on sale? Go here.

WHAT’S NEXT? We have New York City (Andy) and Washington DC (Ben) coming up shortly. They look sweet.

If you haven’t seen it already, head over to the indiemapper blog for a quick tutorial on how to create some cool water/land boundary effects with a few clicks of indiemapper.

Good news, we’ve improved the export options from ColorBrewer2.0. Starting today you’ll notice a new export option: permalink. This allows you to bookmark and share specific color schemes + number of classes without having to hunt around for them. For example, this will automatically open an 8-class red sequential scheme. Neat, huh?

If you have other ideas for ColorBrewer, drop us a note.

We are so pleased to accounce that indiemapper.com has launched and is ready for everyone to start making beautiful maps right away. Sign-up for you 30-day free trial. Watch screencasts of what indiemapper can do for you. Once you sign-up, you can always browse our easy-to-follow tutorials and support site to get you started, or if you are like most of us, just dive in and have fun.

Happy map making!

The title was one of the opening statements made by Google’s “technology evangelist” Ed Parsons in a recent talk for the British Computer Society. In the talk he argues traditional street maps are bad (all of them) because they fail to engender a sense of place and because they abstract the world using map symbols. He goes on to say Streetview is good and doesn’t suffer any of these problems. So is Google Earth. The take-home message is that 2D is bad! Maps symbols are bad! Photos are good! And paper is bad! [subtext: Google doesn't make paper, but if we did, we might soften our stance].

Here is my concern: I’m not aware of any research to support such simplistic claims. Merely saying them, repeatedly, doesn’t make them true. The wayfinding research that I have seen shows that for some users, for some map reading tasks, yes, absolutely Streetview and Virtual Earths and geo-tagged photos can help. And for some users and some situations paper is better than pixels. And for some users, and some kinds of data, 2D is better than 3D. But none of those statements is a blanket truth and by outright rejecting all traditional maps in his talk–even if just for wayfinding on mobile devices–an otherwise solid argument is overshadowed by hyperbole.

If drug companies made arguments like these they might try to convince us by saying “Aspirin is bad. Aspirin may make your arms fall off. But our new drug has none of these problems. Use our new drug.” The difference is drug companies are legally obligated to back-up their claims. It is perhaps the reason they don’t employ “evangelists.”

The deeper, more troubling message that we hear again and again is that cartography is little more than making street maps.  And the flip side of that coin is the only reason we use maps is for wayfinding. Streetview is very cool (it really is), but it is also pretty specialized in its uses and the advent of it does not in fact “kill cartography.”

Cartography is more than taking photographs of a street. It’s a shame that someone with this level of influence at Google has such a limited view of why we map.

In case you haven’t seen it over on the indiemapper blog, this is a composite view of all the data loaded into indieprojector since it was launched earlier this summer.

I’m pleased to announce we’ve launched ColorBrewer2.org! After 8 years, which is about 80 in web years, it was time to update and overhaul the much-loved ColorBrewer. I was lucky to be a co-designer on the original and with the Flex development talents of Andy Woodruff we were finally able to implement ideas that had been kicking around. This remains totally free and adds some new features that’ll make using this easier and faster.

New Features include:

1. EXPORT: We never really had this before and now you have four ways to get colors out of ColorBrewer: export Adobe ASE color swatches directly into Illustrator or Photoshop, copy and paste color specs, download an Excel file of specs, or even run ColorBrewer right inside ArcGIS (thanks to the folks at the NCS).

2. MILLIONS OF SPOT/ACCENT COLORS: You can now check any spot color against the schemes, not just the pre-defined 8 we use to include. For example, you can now see how well your specific company colors work against any scheme – just type in the hex/rgb/cmyk values and take them for a test drive.

3. FILTERING: You can now narrow your search and find what you’re looking for much faster using filtering by colorblind-safe, print friendly, and photocopy-able check boxes.

4. TRANSPARENCY: This one was much requested, especially by folks who wanted to preview how well the color schemes worked on mash-up tiles and terrain/hillshading. This one was tough becuase the quality guarantee (and testing) behind the schemes was done with fully opaque colors and white backgrounds. So be carefully not to assume that the schemes will work as well once you start changing their opacity and merge them with other map layers, but if you are cautious (e.g., 3 or 4 colors) it may work for your needs.

One of our core ideas of our company is that we can and should donate some a portion of our time to fun side projects. Updating ColorBrewer was just such a labor of love and we believe, deeply, in the need for tools to support the on-going democratization of cartography and also the need for good design in the world. Cheers!

Google Earth is amazing. As we’ve commented here before, it continues to blow our minds and has also done wonders for the popularity of maps. And let’s be honest, it looks super cool. There is no doubt that Google Earth is much sexier than that boring old atlas collecting dust on your shelf: It’s interactive, seamlessly integrates distributed data sources, animates the surface of the earth over time, facilities virtual communities, can be customized by both developer and user, etc, etc. It’s hard to not be impressed.

So all of our maps should be in Google Earth, right?

Wrong.

In fact, despite recent efforts to create a suite of thematic mapping approaches, Google Earth is a terrible environment for presenting many kinds of thematic maps. I’d go so far as to say that the 3D prism maps and 3D graduated symbol maps we see popping up in Google Earth are pure chart junk, of the kind Tufte warned us about repeated for past 25 years.

3D prism map in Google Earth (blog.thematicmapping.org)

3D human figures as proportional symbols (blog.thematicmapping.org)

CHART JUNK

Chart junk takes what should have been a simple-to-read graphic and makes extracting information (1) slower, (2) more difficult, and (3) more prone to reading errors, because of excessive ornamentation and unnecessary design additions—like adding a 3D effect that communicates nothing in and of itself but simply “looks cool.” This is not idle speculation: Research consistently shows chart junk and “redundant ink” hurt otherwise fine graphics.

Want to see for yourself? Download these two example KML/KMZ files from blog.thematicmapping.org and run them in Google Earth. While you’re looking at them try to extract numbers or compare places: KMZ File 1 |  KML File 2

“BUT THEY LOOK COOL”: A TECHNOLOGY IN SEARCH OF A PROBLEM

As Abraham Maslow said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail.” This seems to be the case with virtual globes and the developers who love them and insist that any and all kinds of thematic data belong there. Instead, I’d challenge us to take a step back and ask,

WHY DO WE MAKE THEMATIC MAPS?

For a long time folks like Robinson, Dent, and MacEachren have been arguing that thematic maps exist to support two basic tasks: (1) the ability to extract numbers/facts about specific places (e.g., 15C in Paris) and (2) the ability to judge those values in geographic relation to other places (e.g., 5C warmer than London, about the same as Milan). In other words, we want both specific details and overall patterns to be obvious on our thematic maps. And we want all of that AT A GLANCE.

The problem with digital globes (as with all globes) is you can’t see half the planet and, due to curvature, really only about a 1/3 of the planet clearly at once. Which leaves us with a conundrum: If you’re only mapping a small place (e.g., a country), why do you need to have it on a globe? And if you have a global dataset, why would you allow your readers to only ever see ½ the data at once? They can rotate the globe (more on this later) but they’ll never be able to see the entire dataset at once. That makes understanding overall patterns very difficult, and asking folks to “remember” half of a global dataset while they spin the globe to the other side is far, far beyond the meager limits of our working memory. If you’re not convinced, just try it.

KNOW YOUR HISTORY

What makes these recent developments even more frustrating is that in the 70s and 80s, with the advent of digital map making, cartographers flirted with, and largely rejected, faux 3D prism maps and 3D graduated symbol maps (like the two examples above) since they suffered from several limits:

1. 1. visual occlusion (not all of the map can be seen at once since some places hide others)
   2. people suck at estimating volumes, especially of complex shapes (e.g., try estimating the size of moving van you’ll need for your home)
   3. mental rotation of complex shapes is extremely hard, so hard that it is often used as a measure of intelligence in IQ tests.

Many a thesis and dissertation was written in the past 40 years demonstrating these limits to human visual processing.

The nice thing about Virtual Earths is that you can rotate them, so the problem of visual occlusion is solved, right? Yes and no. Yes, interactivity and the ability to rotate the globe can help reveal hidden places, but no, these virtual globes introduce a significant extraneous cognitive load because the user must now think about controlling the globe (not always easy with a mouse) while also trying to focus on the thematic content. In fact, adding a complex task, like visually acquiring the Google Earth controls and then trying to figure out how to move/scale/reposition the globe between two other tasks effectively “flushes” short-term working memory. It’s a kind of mental sorbet, which is why giving folks something distracting to do is a common trick in memory tests (they lose their train of thought). Why would we deliberately do this to our map-readers?

BIG PROBLEM: INCONSISTENT SCALE

In the examples above it is really hard to judge relative sizes. Why? Because the scale of the symbols is constantly changing, and the ones closer to the viewer are much larger (and at a different scale) than the ones far away. Given that it has been long established in cartography that people are terrible at estimating sizes, and even worse at estimating volumes, it is utterly inane to compound this failure by drawing the symbols at different scales. Of course it is worse than this: Rotating the globe slides each symbol through its own scale transformation path, changing in size with every pixel the maps are moved.

This is an absolute rule: If you want to give people the best chance to judge the relative sizes of objects, they should all be drawn at the same scale.

STILL NOT CONVINCED? LET’S DO SOME USER TESTING

Judging height is critical to the success of this map, yet most heights are obscured

TASK #1: As quickly as you can, how does Nepal compare to Uzbekistan?
TASK #2: As quickly as you can, find all of the other places on the map similar to Nepal? Which place is most similar? Which one least?

Hard, isn’t it? To be honest, it shouldn’t be: A regular 2D classed choropleth map or proportional symbol map would make short work of those questions. So what did we gain by extruding the countries up into space? Not much that I can see.

1. 1. The Lack of a zero-line referent makes it hard to judge absolute magnitudes.
   2. The “fish eye lens” effect mean each prism is viewed from a different angle than its neighbors, making comparison just a little bit harder as we have to mental account for these differences in our estimates.
   3. It is hard to judge the height of something when you are staring directly down at it. This matters because height is the visual variable that does the “work” in this graphic—it’s how the data are encoded visually. Why obscure the very thing map-readers need to make sense of the graphic (e.g., the side-view height of each polygon)?

SOLUTIONS?

I need to be convinced of two things: (1)  something is fundamentally wrong with our proven and highly efficient planimetric thematic maps, and (2) that reprojecting this data onto a virtual globe somehow solves those problems. Otherwise, we truly have a cool new technology in search of an application, and that’s just putting the cart before the horse.

Some suggestions: First, unless the 3rd dimension communicates something and isn’t merely redundant data already encoded in the colors, sizes, etc., do not include it (for all the reasons outlined above). Second, if you want folks to perform “analytical map reading tasks” such as estimating relative sizes, distances, or densities, keep scale constant. Third, do not obscure parts of the map behind other parts if that isn’t inherently relevant to the data (e.g., this is fine for terrain visualization). Fourth, and most importantly, do some user testing before presenting a new technique as the best thing ever: It’s how research works and why it is important.

So what things are Google Earth (and other Virtual Globes) good for? The consensus around here is (1) to engender, quite powerfully at times, a qualitative “sense of place” or “immersion”; (2) for virtual tourism (e.g., sit on top of Mt Everest) or virtual architecture/planning; and (3) to perform a kind of viewshed analysis and see what can and cannot be seen from locations (line-of-sight). All of those are inherently 3D-map reading tasks in which the immersive, 3D nature of the map is important. By comparison, population data (one number per country) is NOT inherently 3-dimensional and is only made to suffer when dressed-up in prism maps and 3D figurines.

Cartography, like all good design, is about communicating the maximum amount of information with the least amount of ink (or pixels). The world is just too complex and interesting to be wasting our ink/pixels on non-functioning ornamentation.

The first time I used Google Maps I knew that the world of cartography had just gotten a lot more interesting. It blew my mind. What really struck me then (and still does today) is that I didn’t have to learn how to use it: It just worked. It didn’t come with a manual, and I didn’t need a class in it. Rather, I would think, “Hey, I wonder if…” and sure enough it did just that. First try. It worked. What was happening was that my expectations of the map and the feedback it gave—and the speed at which it gave that feedback—left me feeling empowered to explore more, rather than frustrated or confused.

This is true of all the best tools in our lives: they make us feel confident (even smart), not intimated or confused or frustrated. And they quickly become completely transparent. The master violinist, photographer, or painter all work so comfortably with their tools that they are able to translate their powerful and nuanced intentions into a physical reality. We’ve all experienced this – when the interface between our cognitive and emotional selves and the world around us disappears and we are able to lose ourselves in a great book or a great movie (you cease to realize you’re sitting in the theatre watching reflected light on a screen or scanning printed characters on page).

When our tools disappear and become transparent, we are at our best. Psychologists call this ‘flow’ and I think it is the singular defining state of creativity: it’s what happens when we are so deeply engaged with the work we love that we lose track of time and need to be prompted by loved ones to stop and eat occasionally. Mozart had this problem, Newton had this too, and to a lesser extent, so do I every time I fire up Google Earth.  I often joke that Google Earth should come with a warning label: You will be here happily for hours. Proceed with caution.

Now reflect on how rare that experience is in the world of software and web interface design. Why is that? Why are we content to create maps that merely don’t crash? Below I outline how we might, as designers, aim a little higher.

The problem is, as design guru Donald Norman points out in his classic must-read The Design of Everyday Things, most people expect to be flummoxed by new technology, that’ll it be hard to learn, that it will be unpleasant at best.

Why else would people refuse to upgrade software despite obvious problems with their current version — because they’ve done the math, and the current flaws are better than having to learn a new version. Indeed, most people blame themselves when something doesn’t work, saying, “I must be stupid because other people know how to use this,” when in fact it’s most likely a counter-intuitive UI and poor or missing affordances that are to blame. The only reason why other folks know how to use it is because they’ve learned, through trial and error, how to work around those flaws. If software elicits “That made no sense, but I guess it worked…I’ll try to remember that for next time,” it is badly designed. If it elicits “I bet I can do x by using y,” you’ve earned your paycheck (ironically, most payroll systems I’ve seen are horrendous).

How do you know this isn't your interactive map or web site?

Success in UI design is not measured by “Did the person get something at the end?” but rather by “Did they grasp what the tool was capable of and how to use it quickly? What was the mental and physical workload required? How many dead ends did they go down before they found success? Did they enjoy the experience?” among other important questions. The TLX scorecard (designed by NASA) and the GOMS test are two such approaches used by savvy designers to score how well people use their tools, not merely if they can use them (or, as we often see, only use them if they’ve taken lengthy training courses).

Case in point: A Big Ten university I know reserves a mandatory full afternoon to show every new employee how to use the phone message system, representing millions in lost productivity. Uh, Houston, I think you might have a problem, and it’s not your employees. This isn’t just design snobbery it’s massive waste of money and time.

THE IMPORTANCE OF FLOW

Let me propose that the best user interfaces (UIs) become transparent because they engender ”flow.“ For me, this is the holy grail of good design. The 9 components of flow, based on Csíkszentmihályi’s work (see his TED Talk) in the 1970s, can be used as a scorecard for any UI we design or use:

1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities).
2. Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
4. Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
9. People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

HOW DO WE GET THERE?

There is no simple magic formula, I suspect, for what defines a good interactive map (or any user interface) but I think some salient qualities include the following:

1. Give Them Something Quickly. Nothing boosts confidence like finding the power button immediately or sliding your credit card in the reader the correct way the first time (aside: omg card reader designers— after 30 years this is the best you can do? Seriously?!!). I’ve always liked Apple’s “welcome” movie that plays the first time you start up your new Mac – all you’ve done is find the power button but already you feel like you’re off to a good start. A blinking c: prompt is no way to greet your clients.

2. Adapt to the Skill-Level of the User. Maps and software should be smart enough to adapt to the level of the user, from offering pro-level shortcuts to revealing more advanced features as needed — not when they can’t be used and simply clutter up the screen and taunt the user with ”shame you don’t know how to activate me cause I’m all grayed-out.”

3. Understand Affordances. All interfaces, from airport signs to lawnmowers, live or die by them. If you are a designer, you need to eat, breathe, and sleep this stuff for the world already has too many ”Norman Doors.“ Named after Donald Norman (who talks about them in his aforementioned book), these are doors that have a horizontal bar across them and thus suggest that you’re suppose to push them, when in fact you have to pull them (RULE: horizontal bars to push, graspable vertical handles to pull). In the panic of a fire, such design flaws take on new significance.

4.    Eliminate Features Ruthlessly. My two current favorite UIs are the Google Search Engine and the iPod. Both are the model of simplicity and both burst onto the scene and quickly dominated their markets by doing the incredibly counter-intuitive thing: offer the user less. They both removed a whole bunch of features the competition thought were essential. Why? Because we are all swamped with too many choices in our lives (see “The Tyranny of Choice”) and simpler tools are (1) faster to learn, (2) faster to use, (3) cheaper to make, and (4) and less likely to break.

Unlike just about every product ever, over time the iPod has in fact gotten less complicated: The Gen 1 iPod had twice as many buttons as the Gen 3. The iPod shuffle? It got rid of the screen! Heck, the shuffle even eliminated the power jack and let folks recharge directly through the headphone jack (I still don’t know how they did that one). And it sold like hotcakes because it was cheaper to make and easier to use — they killed the features that were underused and kept just the stuff that really mattered to most casual users (pro users can still buy the more powerful models of iPod). And most folks learned, hey, you know, I really didn’t need all that stuff after all, and I just saved a bunch of money…and that is a happy customer.

5.    Build a Well Labeled Emergency Exit. If the user feels like at any moment they might break it, they won’t venture far. The best UIs increase confidence by providing reassuring feedback that progress is being made and encourage the user to keep going. We’ve all been stopped by cryptic warning messages that leave us feeling unsure of whether to proceed or cancel (I usually cancel, unless I’m feeling dangerous or it’s not my computer). Good ideas include a big reset button, unlimited undos, and lots of sign posts such as “Before we close the window, would you like me to save your work for you?” More advanced users can turn off such warnings once they’re weaned off of them. I have archiving software that asks me three times in three ways if I really, truly want to erase a drive and overwrite it. Given the cost of a mistake (10 years of my entire digital life) this five seconds of forced careful thinking is a suitable insurance premium.

Ben's pick for UI of the week: Swedish light switches.

I asked Andy, Ben, and Dave to name their current favorite UIs and Ben suggested these cool light switches in his apartment in Sweden. He writes “(1) really big and square, (2) in the dark, just start smacking the wall, and (3) feels really good to smack the wall in the dark.” Hard to argue with that. Compared to the light swithces we have here in North America these are easier to use (less effort) and result in less fumbling (faster to use, fewer mistakes) and they remind us even the humble light switch can be improved with some careful thinking.