This should appeal to teenagers! It has a large graphic component and easy interaction.
In February 2005, IBM researcher Martin Wattenberg created a Web-based visualization applet, the NameVoyager, to help call attention to his wife’s first book, The Baby Name Wizard, a guide to American baby names. This effort to support his wife’s project swept the Web and became a hot topic of conversation – for those searching for the perfect baby name and for others. Without any advertising, the applet drew more than 500,000 site visits in its first two weeks. It has been downloaded more than 900,000 times as of mid-April. Also in April, Google found more than 11,000 references to the NameVoyager.
It follows usability principles:
The NameVoyager follows Ben Shneiderman’s mantra, “Overview first, zoom and filter, details on demand.” When the applet starts, the viewer sees a set of horizontal layers representing all names in the database. It shows both sexes: red for girls and blue for boys. More popular names have a darker colour.
It’s interactive: it reacts to every keystroke:
To filter the data, you can select Boys, Girls, or Both. If you type letters, the applet takes them as the beginning of a name; the applet will then show only names starting with those letters.
It may even help to predict future popularity.
Wednesday, 2 January 2008 at 16:18
` Whoa! I get back from commenting on the last post and I’m surprised by this one!
` You know what’s really cool? Baby names of different classes – high-class names tend to work their way down the social ladder, so that today’s poorer folks are named after the rich folks of the past!
` I’ll have to check that thingy out!
Wednesday, 2 January 2008 at 18:17
Unfortunately, the applet requires Java to run and only shows US data. For a more international view, check out the Baby Name Map which includes Canadian data.