Wednesday 15 May 2013

Slip, slide, pan and zoom...web map interactivity

I've just finished creating a dasymetric dot density map of the 2012 Presidential election results. It's available as an interactive multiscale web map on ArcGIS Online that goes from 1:18m (where 1 dot = 1000 votes) to 1:36k (1 dot = 10 votes) which can be seen below:

 

I also made a 1:1,000,000 version of the large scale data showing 35 million dots for a huge wall map so I thought I'd use Microsoft's ZoomIt to create, well, a zoomed version which is here:

And the version at HugePic presents the work in much the same way (though you can get metrics there). The interesting thing here is the different types of useability. For the multiscale web map, each zoom level shows re-classified data so you get incrementally more dots as you move through the scales and you can click on the map to reveal data; but of course you don't ever get the impact of all the data at once. Conversely, the large wall map sacrifices some of the background detail but you can see the data at once (when it's on the wall). Every dot on a singel map but the zoomIt controls still allow you some element of interactivity to slip and slide across and within the map. If you have a view on which approach you prefer, add a comment and let me know.

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