Help me, I can't figure out for the life of me what this is.
It suggests to put in "Rob" as a name. I do, I hit "explore", and it says "Alaska 0" and the map is completely white. I try hitting the down button and the map is still white. I try dragging the slider, and everything's still white, except occasionally some state turns a very light gray. (Chrome on OSX.)
I try putting in multiple names, but it still seems to show only the first one in the map?
This needs some instructions/explanations. And from the HN title, I thought this was going to be something about names most associated with rich people...
While I agree that some better hinting is necessary, there is an About link at the top and it's not that hard to get some details about this project through it.
It's pretty intuitive except when you type a name that is very unpopular as a registered first name with social security (which is where the data comes from according to the blog posts behind the About link)
I thought the same thing about "rich people" - I guess he meant rich as in "rich dataset"
I feel like this could have been a lot better. It appears laggy displaying the time line. Why does this operate in small increments rather than be analogous? You can easily interpolate the colors between the previous tick data point and the next tick data point. It would appear so much better if you did. On top of that, it was incredibly unintuitive.
I had no idea what the buttons in the bottom left meant. Why is does the "play" button use a fast forward icon? Why doesn't it turn into a stop or pause icon when it's playing? When I first opened it, there's no indication of why I had to select a gender before I could even type a name. Displaying the input field (it doesn't look truly because it matches the color theme) and the gender button doesn't inform the user what to do at all.
Overall, it's pretty neat but it's a pretty good example of something that looks pretty but is the opposite of usable.
Sadly that's the trend of late. I unsubscribed from /r/dataisbeautiful for this very reason: tired of seeing pretty-looking but functionally-useless data visualizations.
I actually find this sidetrack a bit strange as I spent close to no time on making it look pretty (because I'm generally very poor at doing that), instead focusing on allowing for an enormous amount of data analysis in a minimal interface. I understand some interface elements are unintuitive to some, but that's the nature of sole-developer work where we become myopic about the obviousness of things (e.g. I chose where things went and how they worked, so naturally it must seem completely obvious to me, even if it actually isn't).
On the flip side though, and this is just general commentary about how we analyze works, people who have difficulties assume that their experience is universal by the exact same myopia.
The dragging mechanism is irritating. Sometimes the drag sticks, sometimes it refuses to start, often it selects the whole page. At least allowing a direct click would provide a workaround. (Chromium community build 30.0.1599.101, Mac 10.8.5)
Great app! I liked it once I got to use/understand it, but I definitely want to make some suggestions:
I would suggest that you look into using joyride/introjs to give a user an idea of how to use the app, and what it is...
I eventually figured out what it was and how to use it, and by that time I thought it was pretty cool (I like how the sparkline is on the left hand side) -- but it took far too long to find out what it was/how to use it...
Fun stuff. My mom said she chose my name (Joshua) largely because she didn't know of anyone else with the same name, yet the year I was born just happened to be the height of its popularity. I thought it was kind of odd that 10% of my graduating high school class had the same name (seriously!)
Just a technically inaccurate colloquialism. And yes I missed the sex selector, even though I had explicitly looked for it. Don't know how I missed it.
I don't expect this to do terribly well, but as a side project that I spent a few nights on I'd love to know that it provided a little of bit of curiosity quenching joy for someone. This project was built using the rudiments of HTML5 with SVG, and an architecture purpose built for a very high level of caching (both on the client, and on the proxy that sits in front a the Go instance hosting the SS database dump). The end result is extremely high performance and, I think, eminently usable.
I like this a lot. My wife and I have been having fun coming up with names for the past 15 minutes.
It does need a bit of polishing but not to the degree some commenters here are suggesting. You have an explanation linked through "About" to a blog post. Some of that detail should probably be on the graph, e.g., explaining what clicking on the legend does.
Based upon the excellent comments to this, I made some usability enhancements --
-a tip telling you to select a gender
-the year will automatically start in a "play" mode (autoprogressing), starting at the first year with non-0 data. This should help those cases where people pull up results and think it is malfunctioning or otherwise not working because of a clear map.
-The autoprogress is clearly indicated by the color of the associated button.
It suggests to put in "Rob" as a name. I do, I hit "explore", and it says "Alaska 0" and the map is completely white. I try hitting the down button and the map is still white. I try dragging the slider, and everything's still white, except occasionally some state turns a very light gray. (Chrome on OSX.)
I try putting in multiple names, but it still seems to show only the first one in the map?
This needs some instructions/explanations. And from the HN title, I thought this was going to be something about names most associated with rich people...