The main points of benchmarking were to find concrete ideas we could use, and to learn from others' mistakes. Below are some of or findings regarding a few services we looked into in more detail.
What's good here:
What we must avoid:
2) The urban mediator (website / demo)
- First impression was very promising. The layout and Look&Feel gave a promise of good quality content and meaningful interaction.
- When studying the titles of the content user gets a feeling of comprehensive and versatile content.
- The design itself is appealing and suitable for the content
- The design of the map is nice and clean and could work also in mobile devices.
What we must avoid:
- Poor and clumsy interaction
- The map is not really dynamic part of the user interface, it is just illustration with minimum amount of functions. The map does not work as an interface.
- The journeys are not interactive in a dynamic sense: The user can select a journey from the list and then follow the given narration. The content of the journey is still images and text.
- There is no visible timeline or visual cues how time passes by -- you can find some years in the text but time is not navigational element.
- Content and design inconsistency
- There is no information considering the amount of content per journey -- it varies from 2 images to n images.
- Confusing design and poor communications
- Difficult to divide which parts of the webpage are functional (ui) and which parts are graphics.
- Do not promise too much -- you do not want to disappoint the users
- How to give a general overview of the project (app, webpage) to new users --> graphics, info text, titles --> what is this service about.
2) The urban mediator (website / demo)
What we can use
- Closely related to our project in a way that location-based information is displayed on a map with symbols.
- They're using open street maps, while we're planning to use google maps. Why was open street maps chosen? Is there something we don't know that makes it more suitable?
- They give people the option to view a list of the data, or the data on a map --> sort of similar to what we want to do.
- Clickable symbols open a popup screen on top of the map to display photos, comments etc. --> pop-ups won't probably work in a mobile environment, but how about tablets/dekstop?
- They have a desktop and a mobile version of it --> Should we only concentrate on mobile at this point?
What we can do better
- Design: right now the service isn't really working, and it looks outdated (at least based on the demo)
- Communications: when entering the urban mediator site, its hard to figure out to whom it is made for. Developers? The general public?
- Usability: It's not that clear what you should do when entering the site. We want to make it obvious.
3) Finally, we found a visualization example that uses gradient colors on a google map
This is not a pretty example, but it is the first one we have found that uses gradient coloring to represent data on a map. It represents how the world's population is divided across the globe, which makes it a valid example for us: it is realistic to assume that places with the most population have the largest amount of reviews, making our gradient coloring equally unevenly distributed.
