Further Development Of The Piwik Map

posted in Cartography on by

Here are my ideas for the next version of Piwik Maps.

  • The map has altogether four views: world, continent1 and two new country views for provinces and cities.
  • In both country views there is one active country. All other countries are displayed in gray like the empty countries in world and continent view (the inactive country borders are missing in the following images, just imagine them for now).
  • Since we now have three different zoom levels it is not as easy to provide simple navigation through the views. Starting from the world view, the user can click on active regions to zoom into it2. At every time, clicking at the “sea” (the white space) leads to a zoom out to the previous level. After selecting a country the user can switch between province and city view using the icons in the bottom icon bar.
  • To improve the navigation between different countries, all inactive countries are labeled with their iso-code (or maybe the full country name). This way the user can easily jump between adjacent countries. Empty countries (= countries with no visitors coming from) are not clickable. The other country labels could be sized relativly to the number of visitors, but this may be to distractive.
  • On top of the map the user can see the total number of visits for the active country.

Province view

Now we come to the first new country mode, which displays all sub-regions or provinces of a country. Since maintaining all provinces for nearly 300 countries means a lot of work, this feature may be limited to some countries at first. The tooltip displays the name (again a lot of work for the translators) and the selected metrics. I’m not quite sure about the percentage value, but I tend to relate it to the countries total value (and not the overall total value as in world view), which would mean “4% of the all site visitors of France came from Burgundy”.

City view

The second country view displays all visitors city in the selected country. The concept should be familiar to most web analytics users, so I think it’s a good idea to adapt the bubble layout from GA. Note the change in the icon bar in the following mockup:

If you have any comments or suggestions for the further development of the map widget, feel free to join the discussion in the comment section.

  1. Some continents are divided into serveral regions for better zooming performance ↩
  2. This is the first difficult point since the world map already provides tooltips for individual countries. Some users might get annoyed when they have to find and click their preferred country twice. On the other hand are users which might get confused when jumping from the world view to a (possibly wrong selected) country. ↩