Web Logs Finally Meet Sim City

l0rd writes "A good piece on wired says : A few games of Roller Coaster Tycoon don't usually translate into productive work, but for one developer the diversion planted the seed for making website analysis more intuitive. Several years after playing those inspirational games, Robert Savage came up with VisitorVille, a website-traffic analysis package that essentially crosses the DNA of SimCity with that of the traditional chart- and graph-centric tools businesses have long been using. Screenshots included."

Comments

Screenshots

[Adam9]

Here's a direct link to the screenshots.

It can even trace traffic flows. Neat stuff.

Re:Picture

[xmas2003]

I remember reading about this a little while back in this blog entry which happens to belong to the winner of the winner of the Nigritude Ultramarine SEO contest.

He does a real nice job describing his experience with it in an article titled "A Postcard from VisitorVille" which includes some nifty pictures - highly recommended viewing.

Re:Best Replacement for Brick and Mortar Customers

[SkankhodBeeblebrox]

from http://www.visitorville.com/overview.html :

Visitor Interaction

Initiate chat with any visitor to your web site. Plus, have them able to interact with you via Live Help. Your visitors are no longer mere IP addresses; they are alive, and now you can assist and engage with them simply by selecting a visitor and clicking "Chat" (and your visitors don't need any software, either!)

So you CAN greet them, just you probably can't add a shopping cart plug-in yet :)

Re:A heretical notion

[tootlemonde]

...the meaningful display of information is about removing visual clutter, not introducing it.

True enough and the service is flawed by that standard but what it is trying to do is a bit more ambitious. As this writer puts it, the service is trying to map an abstract operation to an intuitive environment.

The type of displays that Tufte talks about are often trying to do the reverse: map an intuitive environment to an abstract display. An example would be a flight control system which maps a two dimensional radar screen with labeled, blinking dots to aircraft in three dimensions.

The service's use of SimCity as the intuitive environment is plausible since SimCity is fairly successful in mapping abstract processes in its domain. The problem is that Web site activity doesn't map very well to urban activity.

The extraneous details or visual clutter in conventional graphs are often what give a metaphore its power. What the service may need is simply a better metaphore.