tom haynes blog

Firefox usage visualization 2 years ago

Firefox released data from Test Pilot — their framework for collecting Firefox usage data from users that opt-in and install it — and asked people to visualize it. The data is represents one week of Firefox usage for ~270,000 people, and ~4,000 of them also filled out a survey with basic demographic information. I was interested in what usage looked like over time and by age group, so I pulled out Python, sqlite, and R for exploration and used Illustrator to clean it up.

Here’s the final version:

And here’s a version with my annotations:

How?

I used SQL to grab all the STARTUP, ACTIVATE, SHUTDOWN, and INACTIVE events from the ~4,000 users that filled out the survey. Then I parsed that with a Python script that computed how many users in each age group were online every ten minutes. I plotted that data with R (using LOESS for smoothing) and then tidied it up with Illustrator.

Update: I was selected as a finalist and won a set of four Edward Tufte books!

Code and images are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0.

Usership > ownership 2 years ago

A video that Jane and I made for the Interaction ’11 student competition. The theme is “Use not own,” and our idea is a system that helps people who live in apartments share things with their neighbors.

Flight Paths 2 years ago

Check out this video from the GE show. A little like time-lapse photography, but with video cameras. The typography and the way it transitions in is really nice, too.

Found on datavisualization.ch, a new favorite of mine.

The Atlantic 2 years ago

I love this quote from the president of the Atlantic Media Company on how they re-energized the company:

We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic.

(From this New York times article.)