Data Visualization, Infographic Design, Visual Thinking, Product Development and Marketing professional fascinated by good infographics. Always looking for better ways to get the point across.
Is tracking customers purchases creepy? Decide for yourself! The You are Not Special, but Your Purchases are infographic from Camcode.com talks about profiling customers based on their purchases and then giving them a coupon that is relevant to them. Other companies like Dominos tracks when people buy pizza the most and discovered it was when it rains. So they base their campaigns on local weather patterns.
Did you know that major brands profile you based on what you buy? Retailers like Target and Domino’s Pizza gather and store this data via barcode technology, and they use it to determine everything from how best to market to you, which coupons you’re most likely to use based on your life stage, and what you might buy based on previous purchasing habits. Yes, they get all this from scanning a barcode! It’s what’s known as predictive technology, and major retailers use it to create database-driven consumer profiles to not only boost sales, but also to create more personalized buying experiences.
We decided to take a closer look at predictive technology and its role in consumer profiling. We did some digging and put together this infographic called, “You are Not Special, but Your Purchases are.”
I like how this design walks the reader through a easy to understand story about retail profiling.
What is Retail Profiling?
How does it benefit both consumers and retailers?
What do customers find disturbing about tracking?
Real-life case studies
Some of the dark red on red colored visualizations are hard to read, and the footer should include a copyright statement. The brand URL back to Camcode.com is included, but there should also be a URL to the infographic landing page so readers can find the original high-resolution version.
Retail-integrated eCommerce is a business model that allows branded manufacturers to sell directly to consumers and pass those orders to their retailers for delivery to the customer. According to March 2012 surveys answered by over 200 branded manufacturers and 1,300 retailers, retail-integrated eCommerce benefits branded manufacturers in the following ways.
This is obviously a design for a niche audience, but I can tell you from past experience that Branded eCommerce is a HUGE challenge. A company makes products for the end user; however, their immediate customers are usually retail stores. As soon as a product company starts trying to sell their products on their own website (cutting out the retail store), they suddenly become a competitor to all of the existing retail store customers. The idea of Retail-Integrated eCommerce is a potential solution.
The statistics at the bottom of the infographic that explain this challenge (not visualized) are so important, I think they should have been visualized and highlighted at the top of the design. This is the background information that makes the rest of the infographic relevant.
In 2012, 70% of retailers said they would reduce buying from brands that sell online directly to consumers, with 9% saying they would cease buying from that brand altogether.
This is a good design that doesn’t try to throw too much information at the reader. Most of the important data points are clearly visualized with short descriptions. The orange color scheme clearly identify the design with the Shopatron brand.
If you ever find yourself in the UK, this will be a very helpful infographic! The Michelin Star Lunches infographic from thetrainline.com keeps your belly, taste buds, and wallet happy!
For passionate foodies, Michelin star food is one of the finer things in life. However, for many of us, such top quality dining may feel out of reach price-wise. In fact, a day out to enjoy the finest dining (maybe taking the train and enjoying a guilt-free glass of wine or 2) could be as affordable as £15 for two courses at the two star gastro pub, the Hand & Flowers in Marlow. Even fine dining in London is affordable with 3 courses at Arbutus, Soho for just £17.95.
Look at our handy guide to all the Michelin starred restaurants in the UK above - shown in order of their most affordable set lunches.
This is a fantastic, informational, reference infographic to help you find outstanding food at reasonable prices…as long as you go for lunch instead of dinner. Color-coded by region of the country, and organized in ascending price range, this design tells one story really well.
Seriously, if you travel or live in the UK, I would keep a copy of this infographic on your phone just so you could easily lookup these highly rated restaurants near you.
The Money Chart from Randall Munroe’s webcomic xkcd.com is a huge poster showing the scope and scale of money flowing all over the world. In a great move for transparency, the entire list of over 200 sources is also online.
This is the poster version of comic #980, which is a guide to money. It started as a project to understand taxes and government spending, and turned into a rather extensive research project. With upwards of 200 sources and 150,000 tiny boxes, it’s best appreciated in poster form. The 36”x24” high-quality poster print allows you to stand back and, all at once, take in the entire world economy.
Each square represents one unit of the specific section it’s in. One dollar, One million dollars, One trillion dollars, etc. To provide some scale, each section is then visualized to scale in the next higher section. Here’s the transition from dollars to thousands.
In honor of our upcoming shopping holiday, Crazy for Black Friday Deals from BradsDeals takes a look at some of the stats behind Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving) shoppers.
BradsDeals created a Crazy for Black Friday Deals infographic to illustrate historical Black Friday figures as well as the shopping trends and predictions for this year’s holiday.
If you live in Minnesota, congratulations, you live in the most Black Friday crazy state in the country. And while Black Friday fans in major cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago may be more likely to cruise Black Friday deals on their smart phones than shoppers in smaller towns, the Dallas suburb of Carrollton blows everyone out of the water with 60% of Black Friday searches happening on mobile devices. WOW.
I live near Carrollton, but I wouldn’t consider it a particularly tech-savvy area. Apparently, they’re good with mobile shopping…who knew?
Of course, I get tons of Black Friday infographics submitted to the site, but I really liked the design of this one. The information is visualized in a clear, easy-to-understand design. The visuals are simple and relate to the data. Maps for cities, calendar for days shppers make plans, doughnut diagrams for percentages and silhouettes of top products.
On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be a cohesive story to this infographic. It’s a collection of disconnected data points about top cities, mobile trends, top products and when shoppers make plans. Also, the design is missing a list of the data sources, the URL for readers to find the original posting, a copyright or creative commons claim and recognition of the designer. Why should we trust any of these statistics?
New York was the favourite travel destination for UK travellers in the first six months of the year despite the average hotel price in the city hitting £160, according to the latest Hotels.com Hotel Price Index™ (HPI®).
The 6% rise followed strong demand from domestic travellers and a surge of overseas visitors cashing in on the appreciation of their currencies against the US Dollar.
The Big Apple was one of six US cities in the top 20 list with Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orlando and Miami also featuring as the Pound held its own.
I like the design experiment with the Polar Area Diagram (Nightingale Rose Diagram), but the colored sections relating to two different axis are a little hard to understand. I really like the monument silouettes for each destination. Very similar to an earlier design InfoNewt did for them about the Hotel Price Index.
The infographic is missing some form of copyright license and the URL to make it easier to find the original infographic.
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:
Project Manager decides to make an infographic with some data.
Project Manager brings on board a Programmer and Designer.
Project Manager must decide on the balance of technology vs audience, based on discussions with the team.
Designer fleshes out some rough concepts.
The team meets to discuss; each has specific input:
Project Manager: vision and potential target audiences.
Designer: design concepts and how to make it clean.
Programmer: what is possible. Ideas based on what the technology can do which PM and designer may not be aware of.
Designer creates fleshed out design.
Team meets again and iterates over designs until everybody happy.
Programmer puts together technical spec on how it will be built, which will influence deliverables from designer.
Designer sends across deliverables decided by programmer.
Programmer builds the first functional version.
Team meets and probably iterates and refines design in same process.
The new 2012 Death & Taxes poster has been released, and this year it’s better than ever. Designed by Jess Bachman (ByJess.net) this poster visualizes the 2012 proposed U.S. Federal Budget. The Death & Taxes poster is one of the best infographics I’ve ever seen, and it gets better every year.
“Death and Taxes” is a large representational graph and poster of the federal budget. It contains over 500 programs and departments and almost every program that receives over 200 million dollars annually. The data is straight from the president’s 2012 budget request and will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress to begin the fiscal year. All of the item circles are proportional in size to their funding levels for visual comparison and the percentage change from both 2012 and 2002 is included so you can spot trends.
PURCHASE: This year, Jess also had the opportunity to partner with Seth Godin and his Domino Project to make the full-size 24” x 36” poster available for purchase through Amazon. Currently, you can purchase a copy of the poster for $19.99. Also, check out Jess’s video introduction on the Amazon page.
POSTER GIVEAWAY: Cool Infographics is giving away one FREE copy of the poster. The free poster will go to one randomly chosen person that tweets a link to this blog post on Twitter and includes the hashtag: #deathandtaxes. I included the hashtag in the post title, so any retweets will be automatically eligible. NOTE: you must also be following me on Twitter (@rtkrum) so that I can send you a direct message if you have won!
I will choose the winner at 12 noon (Central Time) on Friday, November 11, 2011 (11/11/11). I will contact the winner, and order the poster from Amazon to be delivered to the winner.
INTERVIEW: Similar to last year, Jess was willing to answer some behind-the-scenes questions about this year’s poster:
Cool Infographics: What’s the most interesting thing you learned from the 2012 data?
Jess Bachman: Lots of reductions in the military side. It’s mostly from the OCO war funding, but its interesting to see what actually is getting cut the most. Mostly Army funding and RDT&E across the board. I would think the OCO was mostly Operations and Procurement.
Cool Infographics: Has you design process changed at all this year? What software did you use to help dig through the data and create the design?
Jess Bachman: Well this year I tried to work exclusively within the official spreadsheets, rather than pick out the numbers from the paper (PDF) budget. I think it’s more accurate and easier to get totals. Mainly just used excel and photoshop as always.
Cool Infographics: When did the 2012 data become available, and how long did it take you create this year’s poster?
Jess Bachman: It was supposed to be released in February but it was a month late. I started moving on it at a full clip then got involved with Amazon/Godin and the timelines shifted quite a bit, so while I usually get the post out in April, it was released in September this year.
Cool Infographics: How did working with Seth Godin and the Domino project come about?
Jess Bachman: Seth just emailed me out of the blue. We talked and it seemed like a no-brainer.
Cool Infographics: How does working with Amazon and the Domino project change how you print and distribute the poster?
Jess Bachman: Well previously my Mom did most of the shipper and I also had a 3rd party do fulfillment and shipping. It’s a rather time consuming and frustrating process. Sending out orders, doing customer support, paying vendors, etc. Now it’s all in Amazon’s hands. They got it printed and of course are warehousing and shipping it too. I’m quite glad as they do a much better job of shipping than I do. Of course they also take their cut of the profits. As for Domino, they have their own distribution channels and lists and also work closely with Amazon to make sure the product page is well presented too. This year it reached #18 on the best sellers list. I guess that makes me a best selling author. I don’t think I could have accomplished that without Domino/Amazon.
Cool Infographics: I see you made a video to include on the Amazon page, how was that experience?
Jess Bachman: Seth told me they needed a video ASAP so I just made one that afternoon. I suppose I would put more effort into it next year but videos help sell products and i think it does a good job of that.
Cool Infographics: Any new design features added to the poster this year?
Jess Bachman: I wanted to include some non-governmental items in the poster this year for reference. They are in the bottom left and include things like the size of the video game industry, bill gate’s net worth and other such things. When talking about billions of dollars all the time, sometimes you need to get out of government-mode to put those figures into further context.
Cool Infographics: The past posters have been shared very heavily in social media, which social sharing sites have you found most successful?
Jess Bachman: Well, Digg has traditionally been a big asset, but then Digg fell apart so I no longer pay attention to it. In general, I have abandoned the traditional accelerants like Digg, reddit, etc. and instead focus on my network of bloggers and influencers. Combine that with Facebook liking and you can really spread something.
Cool Infographics: Last year we talked about some favorite places that have the poster on display. Any new ones this year?
Jess Bachman: Well, with a larger audience and hopefully more sales, the poster will be everywhere. Unfortunately, I get lots of requests for discounts for schools with tight budgets, but I have no control over price anymore. I can say that an iOS app is in development so that will be interesting. My ultimate goal is to get on the Daily Show to talk about the poster in April. People constantly tell me I need to be on there, and I’m a huge fan, so I figure I have a good shot, just need to nag the right people.
What is a Stock? from Mint.com explains what stock ownership is. It’s informative to the readers (a little text heavy), and doesn’t come across like an ad.
To make investment choices that ultimately pay off, you need to start by knowing the fundamentals. It’s a step many investor wannabes skip, since… well, studying the basic terms and trends is not exactly entertaining. We thought one way of helping you get a jumpstart on your basic investing terminology is a series of infographics that explain, visually, basic concepts. First up: what is a stock?
This is a good example of what I call the Online Lifespan of an infographic. Instead of an infographic about a recent news topic, this one covers an informational topic that doesn’t change or drop out of the news cycle. It’s more than a year old, but the information is still relevant, and continues to drive traffic for Mint. This design probably has an Online Lifespan for 4-5 years before the Dow Jones chart at the bottom makes the whole infographic feel dated.
What’s the line chart in the middle? It’s a timeline, but the height of the line chart has no meaning whatsoever. This should have shown some type of information, but instead is just confusing to the reader.
The team at DigitalSurgeons has taken it upon themselves to design the FEMA on Warning Watch infographic that looks at how 2011 (through Spetember 14th) is draining all of the FEMA funds.
We’re obsessed with data and showcasing it in a way that anyone can digest. This was unsolicited by anyone, and we just wanted to raise awareness for how much of a reality FEMA exceeding their expense budget on natural disasters was.
After our office was shaken up by the East Coast Earthquake and pelted with rain by Hurricane Irene, we got to thinking about the freak weather being experienced across the country, and the bigger question of how the damage was being paid for. As it turns out, FEMA is starting to ask itself the same question. We created an infographic that outlines the damage caused in the wake of the natural disasters that have ravaged the country and the amount of money being spent to clean up after them.
They’ve also gone one step farther, and created the SorryMotherNature.com site where anyone can pledge to make a difference.
Randy
