Tag Archive for 'Visualization'

Considerate Creator

I just completed my PersonalDNA - a fun, free and eerily accurate personality test. According to the DNA test results, I’m a considerate creator which is explained a bit more in the personalDNA map below. The map can be read by moving your mouse over any part of the box or strip to learn more about the traits that the colors represent. For those who prefer words, the full report can be found here.

Not only can you share you tests with others but you can also invite them to assess your personality. Click here if you’d like to asses me - I’m curious to see different assessments and if they match up at all. I must admit, all of the traits seem rather positive so it’s hard to go wrong however you answer. There is no obligation from either myself or the system to share the test once completed, and I’d be happy to return the favour. I?��Ǩ�Ѣd also like to see how other people did on the test, so feel free to post links your own assessments in the comments section.

In addition to being a pretty darn accurate personality test and a fun way to get to know others, the test itself has a pretty cool interface. Instead of using your standard checkboxes and radio buttons, the interface was designed with sliding scales and animations. Having a range of values makes the questions a lot easier to answer as you aren’t stuck in the “yes/no” or “yes/maybe/no” trap. My favourite was the glass animation where you had to “pour” your answers into a glass. I don’t know if these features make the results more accurate, but they sure do make writing the test all the more fun.

Update: I had a few friends asses me and it turns out that in addition to being a Considerate Creator, I’m a Dynamic Inventor, Animated Creator, and a Benevolent Creator x 2. Thanks to everyone who helped out - it was a lot of fun!

Tagrolls: A Tasty Visual Treat

Tagrolls are a handy way to display your del.icio.us tags as part of your website making it easy for yourself or anyone else to browse your bookmarks by topic tags. There are several customizations which can be done to display your tagroll using the del.icio.us service including specifying the order, size, and color of the tags. Using these customizations a lot of additional information about your tagging habits can be conveyed in a visual way. When creating my own tag cloud, I choose to use colors and sizes that would display additional information about my tags - a large font and a hot color (red) for my most popular tags and a smaller font with a cooler color (blue) for the less popular ones. I ended up with the following two tag clouds:

When displayed as a tagcloud sorted by frequency, you get a nice looking gradient that not only looks cool but that says a lot about my tagging preferences. When displayed as a tagcloud sorted alphabetically, you get a more ordered listing with “hotspots?��Ǩ�� representing the most popular tags. The alphabetically listing conveys the most information since it provides two ways to scan (alphabetical listing and visual clues to frequency) whereas the tagcloud sorted by frequency only allows for browsing by frequency, something which is enforced twice in this organization. Although I like how the gradient looks visually in the transition from hot to cool, I choose to go with the alphabetical ordering, as it is the easiest way to scan a list of information and the “hotspots”, given their color and size, provide a visually attractive and effective way to identify the most popular tags.

Originally published December 12, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.