Announcing MobileVis – Data Visualization on Mobile Devices

Back in January, we announced the receipt of a Prototype Fund grant from Knight Foundation to explore the question: how does one design data visualization for mobile devices?

Why are we asking this question?

Data Visualization is common in everyday communication online and in print media. As consumers shift to mobile devices for their daily information consumption on the web, we are faced with the challenge of designing new interfaces and interactions that work with these smaller screens. While responsive web design principles help, displaying and interacting with information brings some additional challenges to the table.

Today, we are really excited to launch MobileVis, our exploration of these challenges. MobileVis is comprised of two parts:

• A (growing) collection of examples and conversations about data visualization use on mobile devices, where users can submit additional examples.
• A (growing) collection of design patterns that we identify from these examples.

What can you do with MobileVis?

We’ve written an extensive guide about what you can do on MobileVis. You can browse examples according to many different criteria, including those:

• submitted by other users, like this one.
• tagged with a certain tag, like everything to do with Maps.
• by a certain creator, like all of ProPublica’s Examples.
• by a certain user, like all submissions by @ireneros.

You can also submit new examples with us!

Community Driven

MobileVis is a community project. While we are kicking things off with a collection of amazing examples spanning the work of leading organizations like ProPublica, The Boston Globe and The New York Times, this example base needs to grow! Anyone can log in with their Twitter username and password and add examples of their own.

The code for the Gallery and Patterns portions is available on GitHub: gallery and patterns.

Please help us make MobileVis better! For any questions, email Irene at bocoup.com.

For more details about the grant, see here.