Here’s a great example of an interactive chart on i-Village. It allows you to explore the popularity of given names from the 1880s through 2004 using SSA statistics as the base data.

It is successful on many levels. First and foremost, it makes looking up names fun - you can check how popular any given name was (even your own) through 124 years of American history.

Second, the interaction is both simple and effective. Start typing in a name and the result set - and charted results - are narrowed in-line with what you type and the chart scale changes dynamically (changing chart scale can be dangerous BTW as it may over- or under-exaggerate what is happening) to more clearly show the trends for the names displayed.

Using a stacked areas makes understanding the popularity of a name at a given time nearly instantaneous and if you want more speficifity (rank, decade) you can roll your mouse over the area chart for a pop-up data label.

I guess it’s just impossible to get away from blue and pink when talking about baby names, however those colors are clearly differentiated so it is easy to pick out the boy-name trends from girl-name trends. Alternatively you can select to display only boy names or only girl names.

In any case, this is an excellent example of a report that is interactive, clear and effective.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 11th, 2006 at 9:50 am and is filed under charts, visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.