Connectivity and information design
Posted: February 23rd, 2009 | Author: Noah | Filed under: Information Design, Technology | No Comments »I just ran accross a very interesting study called the “Connectivity Scorecard” about the reltive connectedness of different countries. Normally these kind of studies talk about averge speed of connections and percentage of people with high-speed internet connections, but this study takes a much more holistic approach to the idea of connectivity and talks about 6 different components:
- Consumer Usage & Skills
- Consumer Infrastructure
- Business Usage & Skills
- Business Infrastructure
- Government Usage & Skills
- Government Infrastructure
The great thing about this methodology is that it adds many different dimensions to the idea of connectivity by expanding both the sectors looked at and the going beyond mere infrastructure. This rings true to me because it allows a country like Mexico to score highly on Consumer Usage & Skills while still ranking the country fairly poorly on Consumer Infrastructure. Mexico has lots of internet users in internet cafes and similiar locations, but fairly poor penetration of broadband internet to the home. It also alows the US to rank very highly in the study despite the relitevely poor Consumer Infrastructure score.
The only issues I have with this study is in the interface and design of the report. Here are the issues I noticed:
Country color: I can find no rhyme or reason behind the color chosen for each country. At first I though it might have something to do with their ranking on the chart, but that didn’t seem to fit. Then I thought it was a regional designation, but that also doesn’t work. I really can’t tell why the countries are in a particular color.
No way to compare two countries: This seems like an obvious shortcoming especially given the wornderful radar charts used to display the varias components of the score. It would be nice to be able to choose 2 or more countries and see their relative scores on a radar chart or in a table. This would allow quick comparisons to understand why, for example, the US got a score of 7.71 and Sweden got a score of 7.47.
