SNL Pokes Fun at the Magic Map

SNL Weekend Update (Thursday Edition) finally poked fun at CNN’s magic map operated by John King. Hilarity ensues! Watch:

The Whole Internet on your iPhone?

Apple likes to claim that the iPhone puts the whole Internet in your hand:

And, for the most part, it’s true. The question I’m considering here is: is that good?

There is so much screen space on a desktop or laptop that web pages are bigger, wider, and filled with graphical ads. When you try to shrink this down onto iPhone size, well… take this screenshot of the Washington Post:

The headlines are barely readable! Once you make them out, you can click on an article, and it’ll load it up. The whole page, including ads:

You can zoom in with a double-tap, at least, which makes the text bigger and more readable, thank goodness:

But there’s a lot of squinting and careful tapping to make sure you zoom in and not accidentally tap a link. Kind of a pain. OK, a real pain.

A lot of sites are still offering mobile versions - or, even worse, creating an iPhone-specific version that mirrors the main site. It’s not the whole Internet, but it’s way more usable. Here’s the mobile Washington Post site:

And then, when you click on an article? One-column, reasonably sized fonts, easy to read and scroll:

In my opinion, the mobile iPhone-specific Internet is far more usable than the Whole Internet that the iPhone gives you. It is good that the iPhone can render almost any page you navigate to, and it’ll be somewhat usable. But when the best usability experiences come from a limited version of a website designed specifically for your device, there’s a problem.

The solution, I would think, would be a larger screen. That would give the device more pixels to work with so text on web pages wouldn’t have to be so imperceptible. Of course, this makes the device bigger, less pocketable, and far less desirable. There are solutions, though: mini-projectors are here, folding and scrolling displays are not quite, and other technologies someone must be working on. Until then, we may be stuck with users hoping their favorite sites also develop limited versions of themselves, just for the iPhone.

CNN analyst John King’s Magic Map

Politics always has its blowhard pundits, but when it comes down to it, it’s all about numbers. Data from states, counties, men, women, blacks, whites, Asians, and every other way you can slice up America. How do you present that data without being boring? My last post focused on an intuitive graph method; this post highlights a really impressive video presentation method.

If you follow technology, you likely know about Microsoft Surface, a multi-touch table that Microsoft wants to get out to people. A company called Perceptive Pixel apparently already has a technology out that can accomplish this. You can see a demonstration video here that shows how cool this technology is.

Being able to throw up maps, videos, charts, and whatever other media you have onto this screen is impressive enough. Being able to manipulate them, draw wherever you want, tap on pre-definied hot spots (such as states or counties) to bring up extra data, and numerous other neat toys? It makes for a very smart presentation of a lot of data.

Observe this YouTube video from CNN’s John King. He is talking about North Carolina in the Democratic primary race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. You can see how John King shows videos supporting his points and sections off portions of North Carolina to demonstrate where the candidates need to win:

Technology helping to present mounds of data in an understandable way to a large portion of the population? That’s human factors at work.

Graphs Worth a Thousand Words

The background:

This article from the New York Times, explaining how the Obama campaign is trying to get Virginia to swing for a Democratic presidential candidate (which would be the first time in 44 years it would happen). The 2004 wasn’t close (Bush got 262K more votes than Kerry), but Obama would like to focus on areas where Bush won by a smaller margin, which hopefully indicates that voters living there would be more willing to vote for a Democrat.

The need:

The New York Times wanted to show how voters were distributed across the state, especially which areas were more heavily red or blue. Most charts turn states, counties or cities red or blue depending on whether they are trending Democrat or Republican. That’s important, but oftentimes, more fine-grained detail is necessary.

The solution:

This graph could have been done with shades or red or blue. Deeper reds would indicate a larger Bush margin, deeper blue for Kerry, and gray or purple could indicate a middle ground. However, the entire county would be shaded that color, so color saturation would indicate size of the margin. This is graspable by the mind, but not a perfect correlation (greater color saturation = larger Bush or Kerry margin).

Instead, the New York Times chose to indicate bigger margins with bigger circles covering the area of interest. What is interesting is that this still gives the information of which areas are deeply red and blue and which areas are split (split votes indicate no margin for one candidate or another, leading to very small circles). However, this method correlates much better with the underlying concept (larger circles = larger Bush or Kerry margin). A big circle intrinsically means “Wow, Bush really dominated in this county” whereas a really deep red would likely not obviously indicate such a relationship.

It’s a small change in how these numbers are graphed, but it makes the data more easily understood, which is no easy task considering how much data there is out there that must be sifted through.

Information “overload” and the 24-hour News Channels

So it’s politics season. With less than 6 weeks left until the election, more people (hopefully) start paying attention to the news. Most likely, they get their news from CNN or Fox, the 24-hour cable channels. They seem like a good idea - constant information that can be accessed at any time. There is no more having to stay up until 10 PM to get the news.

Leave it to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (in an Entertainment Weekly interview) to discuss the human factors of this information overload (emphasis mine):

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You guys regularly make a mockery of the 24-hour news networks. Do you see anything good about the format?

[snip]


STEPHEN COLBERT: There’s not more news now than there was when we were kids. There’s the same amount from when it was just Cronkite. And the easiest way to fill it is to have someone’s opinion on it. Then you have an opposite opinion, and then you have a mishmash of fact and opinion, and you leave it the least informed you can possibly be.

STEWART: We’ve got three financial networks on all day. The bottom falls out of the credit market, and they were all running around. On CNBC I saw a guy talking to eight people in [eight different onscreen] boxes, and they were all like, ”I don’t know!” It’d be like if Hurricane Ike hit, and you put on the Weather Channel, and they were yelling, ”I don’t know what the f— is going on! I’m getting wet and it’s windy and I don’t know why and it’s making me sad! Maybe the president could come down and put up some sort of windscreen?” By being on 24 hours a day, you begin to not be able to tell what’s salient anymore.

Not being able to tell what’s salient anymore. Amongst all the e-mail and blogs and 24-hour cable news chatter, we can’t tell what’s salient anymore. Googling the term “information overload” gets around 2 million hits, and it’s the new buzzword used to describe the phenomenon of people who can’t manage their e-mail, websites, or other information sources. This is new - within the past decade for most people - and they just can’t cope with it.

The computer scientists’ answer is, of course, technology based. Build better software that can help you condense the information. Better spam filters, RSS feeds to bring information to you, and the list goes on. Yes, the problem of information overload was created by software, so software should adapt. But what about the human? Information isn’t going away; people need to adapt to and learn how to manage this information.

Clay Shirky, a web 2.0 guru, recently gave a wonderful talk on information filtering called “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.” Think about that: it’s not information overload, but a failure of information filtering. People need to learn to better filter the information coming into their brains and decide how best to act on the most relevant stuff.

This gets into the heart of psychology: how do brains pay attention? How can we teach adults to use that knowledge in the real world, and how do we give children the skills to cope with it later? In fact, are the youth of today better equipped to handle all this information? What makes them so? Coping mechanisms? A different brain organization? This all falls into a research area that needs more effort: the psychology of information management. It’ll be huge.