Some people manage to analyse and remember information by writing, hearing or visualizing it. I am definitely part of the latest type.

This is why I am really interested in tools appearing on the web to visualize some experiences like shopping, search and social networking.

Some of these tools serve a practical purpose whereas others focus more on the artistic experience, but the frontier between the two interpretations seem to become more and more irrelevant.

I have made a quick selection of some tools I discovered on the net for different uses:

1) Shopping: it is proven (don’t remember the source but it is quite obvious) that starting a product search with images improve conversion rate. I can personally confirm this assessment as I buy more books on when I use Blackdogair (visual tree of Amazon’s recommendations) than when I simply go on Amazon as I rapidly get lost trying to explore every combination. For lifestyle products, Browsegoods totally stimulates impulse purchase: if you’re a woman and click on the “shoes” category, the vision of thousands of great shoes will definitely drives you crazier than traditional browsing putting in evidence prices rather than images!

2) Search: visualization of search results can cater to some unconscious users’ expectations. For example knowing how many search engines references this result, knowing at first sight if the result is a picture, a video or text, understanding how the different results are linked to each other. This is exactly what Touchgraph offers by clustering results and clearly indicating sources and connections. I also heard that SearchCrystal isn’t bad (even if I haven’t tried it) notably because it shows with different shapes results appearing in different numbers of search engines, as a proxy of relevance.

3) Social networking: this field is probably the one where visualization tools are the most artistically involved, which may lead to think that these visual representations are just “gadgets”, like for example the Facebook Friends Wheel. But, apart from artistic projects, some of them are more useful, to visualize the structure of your network: how people are connected, what are the “clusters” in your network for example. Again, Touchgraph provides a great and customizable tool to do that (the image in this article is the visual representation of the core of my network), including the links between people thought pictures’ tags.

Understanding networks (being recommendations, search results or communities) has always involved visual representation (essentially with basic lines and points), so this is not surprising to feel familiar with these tools. Jérémy always tells me that a great chart is worth thousand words, so he should agree with this article

Fidji SIMO is a co-author on Tech IT Easy, who preferred looking at images than reading text when she was young; it might have left marks! You can find out more about her on this blog’s initial announcement or her blog.

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