Wired, finally, in Italy ;)

Some monthes ago we worked together with Ogilvy Interactive on “weWired.it” project, where we had to focus on interaction design and information visualization issues.

The core concept was about how to represent the Buzz about the upcoming Italian version of the world famous Wired Magazine.

Very few weeks were available to be spent on the project, so we decided to figure out a quick solution to visualize the connections among:

• Time
• People
• Themes
• Social Media (such as: twitter, flickr, youtube and blogs)

The first issue has been related to get information from the internet; we worked hard to figure out how to get information from several sources related to the relevant themes and how to collect them in an appropriate way.

After solving the “data mining process” Ogilvy developed the aggregator engine and we worked on the information visualization issues: we got a lot of noded connected among each other, mainly by contents.

We decided to use a Node-Edge Graph representation in order to better understand the context where each item (author, post or picture) actually is.

Using such representation could also offer a quick insight about “hidden” relations among related items (more over among authors speaking about similiar themes).

Real-time filters (such as time range and/or social media) could also help to better undersaìtand and discovery conversations, without losing focus on selected item.

In terms of challenges we had to find a solution about how to display the maximum number of items in the fixed size of the screen, letting the user able to better select and view any of them. We figured it out adopting some algorithms to position each item next to another, avoiding overlapping.

In order to better use the available screen size, FullScreen feature from the FlashPlayer was adopted as a way to represent more detailed graph, with a deeper level of related edges to be represented.

We used flare in order to quick visualize the interactive graph.