Eye of the Storm
If information is power, the dissemination of information is the most powerful tools a designer or artist can wield. I’ll step down from the Obama-style opener and ask you to consider something most of us look at every day: weather maps. More specifically, hurricane trackers.
Since hurricanes Katrina and Rita, hurricane trackers have become much more than a news item. For most people in the southeastern part of the U.S., they’re very much tools of survival, often being updated faster than a news report can be delivered.
So why is it that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the first resource for tracking these beasts, gives us such limited tools to display hurricane data? The first glance of hurricane data is not very informative, arguably only displaying the impending path of the storm. Further details require digging through a cramped key, and the cartoonish nature of the illustration provides little context to the viewer.
What hurricanes looked like 100 years ago.
This is simply providing the bear minimum of information. To get any deeper you have to load separate maps from their site, erasing most of the context they could provide next to each other or if they were presented as layers.
The NOAA parties like it's 1999.
Luckily, we have other options. Enter stormpulse.com. While the website itself looks like a Frontpage template, the hurricane tracker is there, front and center in all of it’s satellite photo glory.
Now that's information.
The full browser view is the way to go. It allows you to display an incredible amount of contextualized information: forecast models, clouds, historical track, etc.
Pretty scary picture.
The Flash interface is draggable and zoomable, allowing you to see multiple storms at once. I often find myself using my scroll wheel, Google Maps style, trying to zoom in because the interface is so intuitive. The legend is collapsable, getting out of the way when you need it to. All things considered, this web app becomes more than a pretty interface. It’s a tool that puts the NOAA’s site to shame.