Broken Appliances: Repair or Replace?

PartSelect.com brings us a cool, interactive infographic that helps customers evaluate what to do with their Broken Appliances: Repair or Replace?  Obviously a design from an appliance parts retailer showing customers why they should buy repair parts instead of replacing their appliances, but it’s really good information and doesn’t feel like a hard sell.  It is actually very valuable information for consumers.

We created this diagnostic infographic to troubleshoot some of the common problems that affect household appliances. Clicking on the pulsing dots shows each common issue and the parts required to correct the problem. Many people replace an entire appliance, which is neither cost-effective nor environmentally responsible. We displayed the average cost of replacing the appliance as well as the cost of the parts required to fix the problem (and a scale of the difficulty of the repair).

I really like the design that places the replacement parts radially around the applicances.  The color coding for cost and difficulty also works well, but it would have been better without the legend (“Legends are Evil”).  Without the 1-2-3 as the text in the arc, it could have easily said Easy-Difficult-Very Difficult in the arcs.

Apparently the length of the arcs doesn’t have any meaning, although it looks like it should.  They are just designed long enough to fit the text and the images.

Figure 1 - Layering of the symptoms animation

In addition, PartSelect posted a lengthy, thorough post about the interactive infographic development process they went through.  This is fantastic!  While I may not agree with all of the decisions they made along the way, this type of transparency and under-the-hood information is what helps build credibility and trust with customers.

The Interactive Infographic Process

The process now looks like:

1. Project Manager decides to make an infographic with some data.
2. Project Manager brings on board a Programmer and Designer.
3. Project Manager must decide on the balance of technology vs audience, based on discussions with the team.
4. Designer fleshes out some rough concepts.
5. The team meets to discuss; each has specific input:
   1. Project Manager: vision and potential target audiences.
   2. Designer: design concepts and how to make it clean.
   3. Programmer: what is possible. Ideas based on what the technology can do which PM and designer may not be aware of.
6. Designer creates fleshed out design.
7. Team meets again and iterates over designs until everybody happy.
8. Programmer puts together technical spec on how it will be built, which will influence deliverables from designer.
9. Designer sends across deliverables decided by programmer.
10. Programmer builds the first functional version.
11. Team meets and probably iterates and refines design in same process.

Thanks to Stephen for sending in the link!

The Socially Optimized Business

Attributes of a Socially Optimized Business is a new, visual XPLANATION from the Dachis Group after acquiring the XPLANE company.  You can view it in SlideShare (they should have put it into Prezi), or download the high-resolution PDF.

What’s a Social Business? It’s a business alive with energy and big ideas. It’s collaborative, authentic, customer-centric, trusted, open and real-time.

And it’s about time. After decades of mechanistic, process-oriented management dogma, progressive organizations are waking up to the disturbing truth that they’ve squeezed all the creativity out of their business. But when companies embrace organic, passionate, socially-savvy initiatives, they blossom. That’s Social Business.

This would make a great poster!

US/China Trade Infographic [Making-of Video]

Back in 2009 Jess Bachman designed the Visualizing the US/China Trade infographic for Mint.com.  This design uses a sankey diagram visual that has line widths representing the relative size of all the country values.

Like it or not, the US and China have a trading relationship that has global repercussions. The plastic US flags that say Made in China don’t tell the whole story. No, not everything is made in China. In fact the US manufactures and exports almost as much as China but it consumes a great deal more. Hence, the trade imbalance. What’s interesting is exactly what the US imports, stuff like machinery and toys and as much steel and iron as it does shoes. And what we export — high-tech stuff like airplanes and medical equipment and, for some reason, 7 billion dollars worth of oleaginous fruit which is used to make cooking oil, presumably for Chinese food.

A cool infographic all by itself, but even better is that Jess captured screen shots every 10 seconds automatically using Snagit (a process he calls flowcapping), and recently put them together into a behind-the-scenes video and blog post showing his design process.  10-hours of design work, compressed down into a couple minutes.  View the high-resolution version if you can so you can actually read what’s on the screen.  This is the short version.

And the longer, 7-minute version let’s you see even more details behind his process.

Jess (ByJess.net) is best known for his annual Death & Taxes infographic poster of the U.S. Federal Budget, and recently joined the team at Visual.ly as Creative Director.  Great job Jess, and thanks for sharing your process with the world!

Client Infographic: How Affiliate Marketing Works

Recently I designed How Affiliate Marketing Works for Internet Marketing guru Rae Hoffman-Dolan and her site: Sugarrae.com.  You can see the high-resolution version here.

After spending over a decade in the Internet marketing industry, I think I often forget – and have failed to address – the most obvious question most folks new to the industry have about affiliate marketing.

When I appeared as a guest on Weapons of Mass Marketing earlier this week to discuss the topic of marketing affiliate programs, the hosts evidenced the importance of the often overlooked question by leading off their interview with a variation of it…

“How does affiliate marketing work?”

No numbers, no statistics, no data visualizations.  This infographic is visualizing a process, and I do many of these for clients.  Business processes, strategies, workflows, business models, flow charts and explanations of how things work.

In this case, characters on a simple path visualizes a process of 10 steps.  Way more interesting than a text numbered list in a blog post don’t you think?

You should follow Rae on Twitter: @sugarrae

Demand Media - Breaking the Bank

Demand Media - Breaking the Bank is a cool infographic published on OnlineMBA.com by designer Ricky Linn.

The content itself in interesting, and I remember reading the Wired article listed in the sources.  I like that the infographic combines the process flow of content creation, but also visualizes relevant statistics about how big and profitable Demand Media has become.  Overall it tells a good story.

Found on SiliconValleyWatcher.

Google's Collateral Damage

Another cool flowchart-style infographic by Jess Bachman for SEOBook.com.  Google’s Collateral Damage visualizes how Google’s evolving search algorithm is impacting the Web.

Google’s PageRank worked well until people realized what drove search & how to optimize for it. But the web moves much faster than the colleges do. A million spam pages are created every hour! Thus Google’s relevancy algorithms have grown in complexity over the years.

Do You Need a New Logo?

A fun infographic from Watermark Design, Do You Need a New Logo? is a humorous decision chart.

“wink”

The Social Media Effect

This was the original infographic, The Social Media Effect, from InfographicWorld that inspired part of yesterday’s post, The Visual FAQ of SEO.  This infographic maps out the process of what happens when social media gets excited about your posted content.

A great example of why I started the Cool Infographics blog in the first place.  Create a great place to find inspiration to create your own infographics.

How to Crack a Master Lock [infographic]

Designed by Mark Edward Campos, this infographic takes the confusing instructions that have been on the Internet for years, and translates them into a simple graphic.  64,000 possible combinations reduced to less than 100 attempts.

This design project was born to understand the inner workings of the padlock, and to develop a notation system to engage the viewer and provide a guide to beat a pad lock.

Found on Gizmodo.

Welcome to the world baby...Processing

In my email yesterday I received a note announcing the release of Processing 1.0.  It's very exciting to see this project release to the world.  There have been many beta versions leading up to this release (162 versions in fact), but for those interested in creating your own infographics this is big news.  What is Processing, you ask?

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.
Processing is free to download and available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Some of the infographics I have highlighted here on Cool Infographics have been created with the earlier versions of Processing, and I'm hoping for more to come.