Visual Design & Analysis

Information visualization examples that make you think!

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Visualizations of Habit and Routine

Lately I've become interested in the design of visualizations that draw out patterns in habit & routine. To explain what I mean, here are a bunch of nice examples...

Let's start with a visualization of a twitter user's posting habits from xefer.com:


This simple diagram of a baby's sleep times comes from Trixie Tracker:
Simple but effective! Thanks to Nathan's flowingdata for these two examples. (See also a wonderful visualization of the stabilization of a baby's sleep patterns in Winfree "The Timing of Biological Clocks" Page 31, also shown in Card et al "Information Visualization..." Page 5/6).

It seems that some form of heatmap is the most common means of representing habitual behaviours - see e.g., Andrienko et al for a visualization of traffic densities around Milan (red is lots of traffic):
This picture of hotel visitation patterns (Weaver et al) shows the number of visitors over a weekly timescale:
I like the summary at the bottom and right of the main area showing aggregated trends.

Nathan Eagle & Alex Pentland's paper on "Eigenbehaviours" differentiates various routine patterns from a dataset & presents them clearly:
This reminds me of Wijk & Selow's classic paper too.

Does anyone have any suggestions on other visualizations of habits and routines?

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