Jeph,
Sounds good, a few things to think about…
How could you make it obvious what edits are made by the same user and which by different users?
I think either a spark line OR a bar chart not both.
Remember some edits are additive and some are subtractive, and some have both additive and subtractive parts, if your graph has zero as the baseline then how do you show subtractive changes? Consider a baseline that is in the middle or at least weighted a bit so subtractive edits can be visualized.
The time between edits could be just as interesting as the edits themselves so I'd recommend not compressing or ignoring the time between edits on your graph.
As far as grouping or coding the edits you don't want to have information overload, some options could be, by user as I said before, you could average them over a month and ease the line a bit to smooth it out, you could colorize (think heatmap) the graph by number if distinct editors within a set time span to visualize periods where lots of collaborations occurred on the article.
One thing I would challenge you to do since you've begun thinking about controls and interacting with the graph is to think about what a "quiet" state would look like when a user is not interacting with it. Could it be something that is both minimal and beautiful? Could it exists on an article page for a reader to look at, appreciate and get some level of understanding without even interacting with it?
Think about traditional poster design, you have the 10ft view, the 5ft view, and the 1ft view.
What as a viewer do you see at a glance vs a studied view.
If you are new to design you might consider reading some books by Edward Tufte on information design as a primer or Robert Bringhurst's book on typography and layout.
Great work, I look forward to seeing how it evolves.
Jared
Sent while mobile
Hi,
Putting together a bunch of ideas inspired from various places I've come up with a mock Up of the
slider.
- The mock Up shows a two level edit selector bar. The primary bar will show all the edits, the edits will be of equal width with their length varying as a measure of the size of the edit Eg If there are three thousand edits all of them will be shown with a width of 1px or so.
- There is a slider whose width is adjustable which serves to select a subset of the edits.
- The selected edits will be shown in a zoomed in view above the primary bar, here the edits will be bigger in width and easier to view, If the user selects the entire primary bar then the zoomed in version will look like the primary bar.
- A handle bar in the zoomed in view, it can be used to select the starting point of the visualisation or to manually go through the changes edit by edit.
Ideas about grouping the edits etc would be awesome :-) Should we have a sparkline in the primary bar ?
Thanks
Jeph