Ecomagination Challenge Data Viz

Interaction

As part of the GE Ecomagination effort I worked on at Frog Design, this visualization was developed as a way to communicate the success of the Ecomagination Challenge while also presenting ideas and those who submitted them in a new way. The goal was to encourage exploration and play.

The project was done in collaboration with Kris Konno (Project Manager), Ranee Chung (Senior Designer), Dami You (Designer), Vicky Fang (Interaction Designer), Kyle Crouse (Technologist), and Adam Silver (Strategist). It was mentioned on Fast Company.

Early Iterations

Using a square packing technique, this is a simple and visual way to display all the ideas. Colors indicate the different categories, and the sizes indicate popularity of the idea. However, the horizontal scroll makes the interactions tiring when the project scaled.





This concept combines the idea view
and map view. The map view allows the viewers to see the ideas from each region of the world, whereas the ideas view allows the visitors to choose ideas to explore without any geographic implications.





By folding both the idea view and and the map view into one screen, the viewers can instantly see the idea as they are exploring the map. However, since the two panes are relatively the same size, the point of entry is unclear, and the two sides seems to be offering similar functionalities.




We focused on how to create a simple but highly interactive visualization of the ideas. After trying multiple ways to display the information, such as having comments and votes, or time and votes as the two axis, there is a strong clustering on the bottom of the graph, since most ideas only have a few comments. We wanted to highlight all ideas equally.


In order to accommodate the data, we decide to remove the y axis. The ideas are placed on a timeline, the height of the ideas are randomized, and the size of the ring indicate popularity. Although the more popular ideas do have a bigger click target, the visitors are still more likely to occasionally explore a less popular idea near them because of their otherwise equal distribution.


This is the final iteration before the final product. We created a wheel-of-fortune paradigm to display the idea. By randomly placing the ideas on a circle, it eliminates the connotation of having a
y-axis. Also, the visitors could also spin the circle to access more ideas. The final product consolidated the top bar and bottom bar to reduce clutter.