Great Rich Internet Experience: Gapminder World

February 17, 2008 4 Comments

Every once in a while an experience is so good that you have to tell people about it. This happened to me when Harley Manning pointed me to a rich Internet application at www.gapminder.org/world/. Here’s a screen shot, but you need to experience it for yourself.

gapminder.org

The application, which shows life expectancy vs. income per capita across countries from 1975 to 2006, combines five ingredients that are very rarely seen together:

  1. Intuitive interface
  2. Complex functionality
  3. Massive data set
  4. Clear graphical representation of data
  5. Useful animation (it shows evolution over the years)

The bottom line: If this application can be easy to use, what’s your excuse?

Filed under Customer experience

About Bruce Temkin, CCXP
I'm an experience (XM) management catalyst; helping organizations improve results by engaging the hearts and minds of their employees, customers, and partners. I enjoy researching and speaking about these topics. I lead the Qualtrics XM Institute, which is the world's best job. We're igniting a global community of XM Professionals who are inspired and empowered to radically improve the human experience. To achieve this goal, my team focuses on thought leadership, training, and community building. My work is driven by a set of fundamental beliefs: 1) Everything starts and ends with human beings, so you need to understand how people think, feel, and behave; 2) XM is a discipline that needs to be woven throughout an organization's entire operating fabric; and 3) Building the XM discipline requires a combination of culture, competency, and technology.

4 Responses to Great Rich Internet Experience: Gapminder World

  1. Jonathan Browne says:
    February 17, 2008 at 1:59 am

    It is a great application. I also recommend the highly entertaining “boxing match” commentary on it — delivered by Professor Hans Rosling, who introduced “gapminder” to the audience at TED in 2006:

    Reply
  2. guillaume says:
    February 17, 2008 at 7:56 am

    This app is really great. Found it last year, from the 2006 TED talk. It really gives you a cool tool that enables to really think on demographic and socio-economic changes at a global scale. Have you seen China’s ascension? No doubt, they’ll be soon the new mega-super-power.
    BTW, I also believe Google bought that visualization tool, but I don’t know much more about the details.

    Reply
  3. Hisham Abdel Maguid says:
    March 31, 2008 at 3:14 pm

    We Epic Systems together with Beemode (www.beemode.com) have developed a Data Visualisation software almost ready to be released soon.

    We are looking for ideas to promote the software.
    You can view our preliminary version at :

    http://www.epicsyst.com/visual.swf

    Your comments will be appreciated.

    Hisham Abdel Maguid
    http://www.epicsyst.com

    Reply

  4. Pingback: Gapminder World Sets the Standard for Rich Internet Apps

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