Information Visualization

In all honesty, we struggled a lot with the visualization of the data. Why? Simply because we wanted to address different issues at the same time — in retrospect probably too many issues. As mentioned we collected a number of attributes in the form, both quantitative and qualitative. Our initial approach was statistical, abstracted from emotion, a dry representation of data. It soon became apparent that such a visualization did not communicate the core of our project: it did not encompass the emotional or personal qualities inherent to the data set. Conclusion: back to the drawing board — hit it hard! Thus, going back to the core, and taking the stories as a starting point we sketched out different ways of accessing and displaying the content. How to browse the system? How to access the core of the data? What are essential attributes in this particular visualization? What is the essence of the user experience?

In the end we concluded that emotions, music (songs, artists) and memories (stories) are the main attributes, i.e. the essence of our visualization. Consequently we designed a 3 column interface that would reflect this approach, with a distinct focus on the memories. So what does it look like? I included a few screenshots, but I am not yet disclosing the full application. For the simple reason that we are building a public version that will launch sometime soon.